What is an Oral Surgeon? (Dentist for Your Teeth, Mouth, Jaw and Face)

What is the first thing coming in your mind when your doctor recommends you to an oral surgeon? Does an oral surgeon different from a regular dentist? If you need a dental implant, where do you go? This article will help you understand the knowledge and skill a practitioner needs to be recognized as an oral surgeon. Essential tools for any practitioner must be reliable to have an effective and successful treatment.

Oral Surgeon

An oral surgeon is a dental specialist who trained to deal with a dental implant, facial pain, and restorative surgical procedures like wisdom teeth extractions. Notwithstanding standard dentistry services, an oral surgeon can likewise treat tooth and facial injuries, including broken jaws, and knocked-out or broken teeth.

An oral surgeon must attend four years of dental school and at least four years of hospital surgical residency. Oral surgeons, also called maxillofacial surgeons, are skilled to detect, diagnose, and forestall defects and diseases that influence the jaw, mouth, teeth, and gums.

Some oral and maxillofacial surgeons set out on additional training to do facial cosmetic surgery and cure conditions identified with cancer. Also, their training leads them to perform a microvascular medical procedure of the head or neck, or right inherited face and skull irregularities in children, for example, palate and cleft lip.

Oral Surgery

Oral surgery, or most commonly referred to as oral and maxillofacial surgery, incorporates an assortment of procedures that include the medical procedure of the mouth, jaw, and face. A few people view oral and maxillofacial surgery as an advanced type of dental procedure, yet the training extends a lot further what a dentist can do. Depending on the situation, oral surgery might proceed as an inpatient, outpatient, arranged, elective, or emergency procedure. The oral surgeon often works alongside other surgeons like working with surgical oncologists, orthopedic surgeons, or otolaryngologists. In other words, they are working together to deal with complex conditions or in cases including serious head or facial injury.

Different Types of Surgical Procedures

The oral surgeon uses to deal with a broad scope of conditions influencing the craniomaxillofacial complex included the mouth, jaws, face, neck, and skull.

Oral surgery can be comprehensively characterized as being diagnostic, therapeutic, dentoalveolar, reconstructive, or cosmetic.

Diagnostic and therapeutic oral surgery include:

Mandibular joint surgery

The oral surgeon uses this procedure to fix or reposition the jaw to deal with masticatory musculoskeletal pain, temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder, or burning mouth syndrome.

Maxillomandibular osteotom

The oral surgeon performs this procedure by surgically repositioning the top and bottom jaw to progress breathing and treat obstructive sleep apnea.

Radiofrequency needle ablation

This type of oral surgery is minimally obtrusive strategy. It uses high-frequency radio waves to cut off nerve pathways that cause migraine, trigeminal neuralgia, and similar chronic pain disorders.

Septoplasty with turbinate reduction

A therapeutic method including the fixing of a deviated septum and the elimination of nasal bones and tissues to enhance breathing, lessen snoring and cure sleep apnea.

Tumor resection

The oral surgeon uses this technique to remove unusual developments and masses, both benign and malignant.

Dentoalveolar procedures include:

Dental implant

The dental implant is a usual technique to replace missing teeth. Oral surgeon includes not only placing a screw-shaped metal into the jaw bone and use a variety of dental tools to achieve this. But he can also place a subperiosteal implant under the gum but above the jawbone.

Orthognathic surgery

This method is also known as corrective jaw surgery. Your oral surgeon uses this procedure to straighten a crooked tooth or misaligned jaw.

Pre-prosthetic bone grafting

This type of oral surgery requires surgical implantation of harvested bone from the patient. This procedure will give a strong foundation for dental implants or embedded hearing devices, such as a cochlear implant.

Wisdom tooth extraction

This type of oral surgery occurs when you have a problem with your wisdom tooth. The surgeon needs the extraction of bone around the root of the third molar.

Reconstructive procedures include:

Craniofacial surgery

The oral surgeon utilizes this surgical procedure to correct inherited abnormalities such as cleft palate or craniosynostosis or to repair traumatic injuries, including cheekbone fractures, jaw fractures, nasal fractures, and eye socket fractures.

Lip reconstructive surgery

Oral surgeons can also perform lip surgery. They perform it after skin cancer’s extraction to reestablish the presence and function of the lips.

Microvascular reconstructive surgery

This type of surgery is used to reroute veins after the removal of a tumor in individuals with head and neck cancer.

Skin grafts and flaps:

It is a method used after skin disease medical procedure in which skin is either taken from another piece of the body to supplant resected tissues or incompletely eliminated and repositioned to cover a nearby region of resection.

Cosmetic procedures include: 

The oral surgeon who has extensive training can also do cosmetic procedures. Cosmetic surgeries, such as:

• Otoplasty: Reshaping of the outer ear
• Cheek augmentation: Cheek implants
• Blepharoplasty: Eyelid surgery
• Rhinoplasty: Nose job
• Rhytidectomy: Facelift
• Genioplasty and mentoplasty: Aesthetic chin surgery
• Neck liposuction
• Hair transplantation