ORAL SURGERY
Most often these are procedures on the alveolar attachments, parts of the jaw that carry or contain teeth. For this reason, the term dentoalveolar surgery instead of oral surgery is often used for the procedures we perform every day in practice.
The most common procedures in oral surgery are tooth extractions. Despite all the advances and achievements of modern dentistry, it is still not uncommon today that teeth have to be removed due to deep caries, advanced periodontitis or extensive and stubborn periapical inflammatory processes. Also, one of the most common procedures is surgical or non-operative wisdom tooth extraction. For genetic-evolutionary reasons, the jaws of the human species from generation to generation tend to shrink, while the size of the teeth remains the same. This means that in many individuals already today there is not enough space in the jaws for all teeth. Therefore, wisdom teeth that grow last, often remain completely or partially impacted (ungrown) in our jaws. The very existence of an infectious wisdom tooth is not an indication for extraction, but very often wisdom teeth that have not fully sprouted around the gums that partially cover them, develop inflammations that we call pericoronitis and then the most common therapy is the extraction of such wisdom teeth. Wisdom teeth are traditionally associated with crowding of frontal teeth. However, the modern profession, modern oral surgery, is very critical of such thinking and we can conclude that in most cases, impacted wisdom teeth are not the cause of such phenomena in the oral cavity. It should be emphasized that the surgical extraction of wisdom teeth is a completely painless procedure, but postoperative recovery is very individual and scenarios are also possible in which patients feel pain and discomfort in the oral cavity several days after the procedure. For these reasons, the position of surgeons at BELL DENT polyclinic is that only those wisdom teeth for which there is a clear indication are removed surgically.
The second most common procedure in oral chirugia is apicotomy of the teeth, which would literally translate from Latin to remove the tip of the tooth root. It is a procedure that is indicated in cases where chronic inflammatory processes persist around the root tip that cannot be cured with classical endodontic therapy. The apicotomy is then surgically directly approached to the site of inflammation and the inflammation is cleaned, and the tip of the root is removed. In the jaws we also find cysts that most often have their causes in teeth with inflammatory processes around the roots or in the already mentioned impacted wisdom teeth. These cysts are usually not dangerous for patients, but they always need to be surgically removed.
Among other procedures we can single out modealations of the withers, removal of papillomas, fibromas, mucocele and other similar, relatively rare and also harmless changes in the oral cavity. Malignant change operations are already in the domain of maxillofacial surgery. Of course, we must not forget that dental implantology is also a branch of dentistry that is partially affected by oral clearurgia. The procedure of implant placement is of course an oral surgical procedure in the domain of oral surgery specialists. Implant placement is also a completely painless procedure and most often passes with minimal or no postoperative complications. In addition to implant placement, oral surgery solves numerous cases in which patients initially do not have the conditions, i.e. they do not have enough bone tissue to place the implant.
Then we talk about regenerative preimplantological surgery procedures. Regenerative preimplantological surgery implies all procedures of increasing (augmentation) of hard and soft tissues on the alveolar ridge for the purpose of obtaining a sufficient or optimal amount of tissue for successful implant-prosthetic rehabilitation. Bone tissue that replaces lost tissue at the withers can be autologous, that is, it can be taken from the patient himself (most often from the chin or the area of the lower jaw behind the wisdom tooth) or we can talk about artificial bone that is implanted in the place where the bone is missing. Procedures with artificial bone are more comfortable for the patient because a new operational field does not open, but they have their limitations and they can not be replaced by more extensive resorptions, i.e. tissue losses at the withers.