With Surgery
ORTHODONTIC TREATMENTS WITH SURGERY
ORTHODONTICS WITH SURGERY
If orthodontics takes care of aligning teeth, so-called maxillofacial surgery is used to reposition the jaws. It allows the patient to improve certain functions: chewing, nasal breathing, closing the mouth at rest. It allows to correct a skeletal problem, in the absence of growth.
The appearance and proportions of the face are improved. Moving the jaws also moves the teeth and therefore reduces the overall treatment time.
Surgery must be combined with orthodontics to facilitate the surgeon's work and to obtain the best dental relationships afterwards.
WHO NEEDS ORTHODONTIC TREATMENTS WITH SURGERY?
Patients after 16 - 18 years who have finished growing and for whom there is too great a jaw discrepancy to be compensated for by the simple displacement of the teeth. Orthodontic preparation for surgery may begin before the end of growth, but all growth must be completed at the time of surgery.
How does it actually work?
Fig 1: Example of result after mandibular advancement surgery.
The patient is wearing a orthodontic appliance usually fixed braces for 6 to 18 months. During the preparation phase, Dr. David Benguira aligns the teeth on an ideal dental arch form between the top and the bottom jaws. Sometimes it makes the jaw discrepancy temporarely more visible.
The patient sees the surgeon two months before the operation with recent casts to validate the intervention planned with him. A few days before the operation, hooks or buttons are placed in the mouth by the orthodontist.
The surgeon uses hooks or buttons to hang the patient elastic for 4 weeks during bone healing.
Four to six weeks after the operation the patient returns to see Dr David Benguira and resumes the last orthodontic movements, while the mobility of the jaw gradually returns to normal.
It takes about 6 months of orthodontic finishing after surgery.