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Oral Surgery

What is oral surgery?

It is the branch of maxillofacial surgery that deals with “minor” but very frequent interventions to treat pathological situations localized in the mouth or inside the maxillary bones (mandible and maxilla).

What are the most common conditions that require oral surgery?

There are many situations in which the oral surgeon must intervene to solve problems that cannot be managed with medical therapy alone (taking drugs).

Here are some examples:

Impacted wisdom teeth

Wisdom teeth often do not find the space to fit into their proper position and remain either completely under the gum or “half in and half out”. This can lead to local inflammation or actual infection (sometimes even serious), to the formation of pockets and cavities on neighboring teeth or to the formation of cysts in the bone.

In these cases, it is appropriate to extract them: however, since they can be in “strange” positions or close to “delicate” nerves, patients with difficult wisdom teeth are often sent by their dentists to maxillofacial surgeons.

Jaw bone cyst

They are a kind of “bags” filled with fluid that develop inside the mandible and the maxilla. They often grow slowly but expand inside the bone that is slowly consumed and thinned. If left to themselves, they can become very large, become infected and cause the loss of stability of the teeth, deformation of the face and even spontaneous fracture of the jaw. They must therefore be surgically removed because they cannot heal with drugs.

Neoplasms of the oral mucosa

Inside the mouth, lesions can form (in the vast majority of cases benign) on the mucosa of the cheek, lips, tongue, palate that must be surgically removed because they grow slowly and it is best that they are removed early and analyzed in the laboratory with a histological examination to exclude more serious pathologies. Examples of lesions of this type are fibromas, angiomas, papillomas.

What are the stages of oral surgery?

The first phase is always represented by a specialist visit. The surgeon decides whether to intervene or monitor the lesion to see if it changes in size.

If the diagnosis is simple, a lesion removal operation can be scheduled under local anesthesia and then the removed pathological finding will be examined to be sure.

If there are any doubts, you can start with a histological examination that consists of taking only a small fragment of the lesion and then, once the diagnosis is clear, removing the entire lesion.

The patient will then be given some documents that contain all the details regarding the various phases of treatment, preparation for the operation and how to manage the post-operation.