Here are a few examples of procedures that fall under the oral surgery category including some information about the ailments connected to them.
Impacted Wisdom Teeth
If you have impacted wisdom teeth, then chances are good that you’re going to need oral surgery in order to fix it. Wisdom teeth often come into your mouth when you’re in your twenties. They come in long after all of your other teeth have come in. In many cases, this isn’t a problem. However, if you have impacted wisdom teeth, this means that one or more of your teeth are coming in at an angle in your head.
The teeth are basically growing sideways and pushing at the other parts of your teeth. In this case, it really needs to be taken care of as soon as possible. Oral surgery to correct impacted wisdom teeth is usually pretty straightforward. First, an X-ray will be taken to determine what the problem is in your head. Once it’s discovered that you have impacted wisdom teeth, you’ll have to set up a time for surgery.
The important thing when it comes to preparing for this surgery is to make sure that you don’t eat anything for some time before coming in. Your dentist will usually tell you how long this will have to be. This way, you don’t have to worry about vomiting on your dentist during the surgery.
In many cases, you will also need to have someone drive you to the dentist and then pick you up after. The reason for this is because you don’t want to worry about possibly crashing your car due to the drugs you’ll likely have to take in order to not feel the pain of surgery.
The surgeon will then make incisions and remove the wisdom teeth from your head, since they are unnecessary, especially if they are growing sideways. You may not even be able to see them growing int his case. Impacted wisdom teeth can cause considerable danger to you if they aren’t taken care of quickly.
Tooth Loss Surgery
Another common type of oral surgery is adding a dental implant into your head in order to replace a missing tooth. This will make it so that you can add artificial teeth back into your head for practical and cosmetic purposes. This surgery has similar conditions connected to it as other surgeries.
Sleep Apnea Surgery
When you go to sleep at night, your throat muscles often relax and close up a bit. People who have sleep apnea are at risk for these muscles causing the throat airway to close up entirely. This is often a problem since you will wake yourself up many times throughout the night. It’s important to find a solution to this problem since sleep apnea can cause serious problems related to your heart or your ability to breathe. Even if you don’t remember waking up several times at night over and over, this can be what happens during sleep apnea.
In many cases, there are non-surgical ways of solving this issue. For example, you can get special mouthguards that make sure that your mouth stays open at night so that you can sleep normally and breathe normally through the airway that normally closes due to your apnea. Another common option is to use a device that essentially pumps air into your nose in order to make sure that your airway stays and remains open throughout the night. There are even some digital solutions to this problem.
Surgery will often be attempted only if the other methods have been tried and were found to not be effective. An example of this type of surgery is when soft tissues at the back of the mouth are taken out in order to create a larger area for the patient to breathe through. Sometimes tissue is taken from the lower jaw as well.
In addition, sometimes laser surgery is used in order to create more room for a pathway. Some more modern oral surgeries can even implant a device into your body that creates an electrical pulse when your body is detected as trying to breathe that automatically causes your throat to open enough to allow air to pass through properly.
If you suspect that you might have sleep apnea due to partners claiming that you snore a lot all night, or because you constantly feel tired during the day despite often getting plenty of sleep, then it’s important that you go to the dentist to potentially have this sorted out.
