Oral health practitioners are not just professionals dealing with the health of your teeth. Oral surgeons, in particular, deal with a different set of procedures. While procedures still involve the mouth, they require more than just extracting teeth to get rid of pain and to prevent bacteria from affecting a nearby tooth.
Think you won’t encounter an oral surgeon if you take care of your teeth? Here are just some of the tasks an oral surgeon might perform for you:
Wisdom Teeth Removal
Adolescents are no strangers to visiting an oral surgeon‘s clinic in Ogden. Unlike the rest of your teeth, your third molars require a different approach to extraction. Third molars, or the wisdom teeth, come in later, anytime between your adolescent to your adult years. When they do come in, they might be impacted due to insufficient space in the jaw for them to erupt normally. The pain that is associated with their eruption is enough to make a grown man cry. That’s why you need someone other than a regular dentist to perform the procedure using IV sedation. The pain will be unbearable if the window teeth are extracted without sedation, which would be the case if you were to have a general dentist perform the procedure.
Oral Cancer Screening and Surgery
There are mouth sores that are annoying and irritable but will go away on their own within 30 days. However, there are mouth sores that look no different but they refuse to go away for months. If this is the case, it might be something cancerous, as is the case for a Chester woman who needed to undergo 10 hours of surgery to remove cancer that has started to attack the bone attached to her molars. The surgery was only one of her options, but it was the most aggressive and offered the most favorable outcome. Before oral cancer can reach a level that requires immediate surgery, an oral surgeon may prescribe antibiotics to test whether sores react to them, something that cancer cells will not do.
Jaw Surgery
One of the most important parts of the mouth is the jaw. It can be difficult to chew and talk with a misaligned jaw, but fortunately, an oral surgeon can perform corrective surgery with ease. The jaw may be misaligned due to several reasons, such as accidents or inappropriate bite correction procedures. Corrective jaw surgery may take six weeks to heal, during which your orthodontist may start using braces for realignment. The whole healing process usually takes 12 weeks, but your braces may require years to complete bite correction. Jaw surgery on its own or accompanied by braces are determined on a case by case basis. Even those who do not have a bite problem may require corrective jaw surgery for breathing problems.
It takes expertise to perform surgery on such a delicate and complicated part of the face. It’s even harder if a failed surgery has to be corrected by another surgery. Should you have any problems with your jaw, mouth, or wisdom teeth, consult only a certified oral surgeon to prevent more dangerous problems.
