See How We Approach Oral Surgery
Oral surgery is not only the extraction of teeth, but it’s also the biopsy. We will sometimes do an excisional biopsy here. We will sometimes find abscesses that are so large that we wanna make sure it’s something else. We’ll oftentimes find tissue that we’re removing and it looks suspicious, and we’ll actually do an excisional biopsy and send it off. See, that’s another thing that our dental office would do. We also have found, because part of our screen is an oral cancer exam, this is a part of oral surgery too. We’ve also found people who’ve had problems with their sinuses that we refer to ENT. We have found people who’ve had to have maxillary areas removed because of oral cancer. We have found people who are high-risk, and we always look at them. In fact, we even find people with basal cell carcinoma on the face. So, oral surgery is that. Oral surgery is also diagnosing whether somebody’s jaw bone is in such a position that even if you straighten the teeth, they wouldn’t be in the right position. They’ll need orthognathic surgery.
So, as a dentist, you have to know which cases need the help of a specialist also. But the extraction of teeth is one that you don’t get enough practice when you’re in dental school. I was fortunate enough to have gone on mission dentistry. And on a given day, I remember extracting 108 teeth. Now, that’s more than most dental students extract in dental school or their whole career. So, the experience of oral surgery for the dentist in this office, for example, there’s very few teeth they won’t take out. However, we do have a technology called the CT scan. And a lot of times, they tell us that this will require a more individualized customized approach. And the patient has a better possibility of having a good outcome if we engage a specialist. And we will do that before taking on the challenge and go digging. So, I think that’s what sets our practice apart in the year of oral surgery.