Edit: Did not expect this to get so many responses. I’m currently several months into Invisalign so have been super fascinated by teeth stuff and was just curious if there was a surgical way to do it, even if it meant way more money, time, and risk. Thank you to everyone who answered!
In: Biology
This was actually offered to my brother who had a major underbite. The doctors could break his jaw and realign it where it should be and wire his mouth shut. He chose a few years of braces instead.
I had my jaw cut and reattached to my face with titanium screws and plates. I still had to have braces beforehand to move my teeth to where they needed to be after the surgery.
Just be like me. Had oh idk, 6-8 years of orthodontic hell. Retainers. Head-gear. Braces in high school. Something called a MARA (look it up but warning NSFL). If it was metal and went into your mouth I had it at one point. Then at the end of it all they gave up with me and said fuck it and I had lower jaw surgery anyways to implant screws and push it forward a smidgen.
Looking back, honestly, I wish they had just done the surgery from the getgo. Recovery wasn’t very fun at all but in my particular case it would have saved years of just…. awful terrible shit.
For most cases though as others have said it’s probably more realistic to have a couple years of braces as opposed to minor surgery.
Jaw surgery is a major operation and invasive. It can risk damaging your nerves, meaning you may not be able to feel part of your face, permanently.
[removed]
From the comments it seems clear that jaw surgery is used to align the jaw, braces are used to straighten the teeth. They serve different purposes.
There is a lot of misinformation floating around in the comments. Teeth can’t be moved by pulling them and drilling new holes. It would cause tons of issues (killing the tooth) and the success rate of re-implantation would not be good. I’m not saying it’s impossible. It’s just super stupid.
The small blood vessels and nerve would break at the tip of the tooth root as it came out. When u re-implanted it — the tooth would become necrotic (dead on the inside). It would need a root canal. And then it would not be likely to survive long in its new location.
The way rapid tooth movement is accomplished is by surgically removing bone between the teeth and then attaching braces. It makes the orthodontic treatment go really really fast. We accomplish the bone removal safely because we can design 3D printed surgical guides rendered from a CT scan that allow us to drill into the bone without damaging the teeth.
Also… if you have total jaw realignment surgery, the teeth usually have to be lined up orthodontically before the surgery. The jaw realignment doesn’t fix crooked teeth. It just moves the upper and/or lower jaws forward or backwards.
Unpopular opinion: I think braces are worse than jaw surgery.
I had braces, then after two years of a lot of pain but no discernable changes, we went to an oral surgeon who said my prob could never have been fixed with braces and that I’d need double jaw surgery. Unfortunately that meant a year of additional braces before and after the surgery to get the new bite set up….
I must have just recovered a lot faster than the other commenters, because I was out of the hospital the next day. I did have to have my jaw wired shut for 6 weeks and be on a liquid diet, which sucked, but it was fine after that. It also took about 6 months to get all the feeling back in my hard palate. Despite all that, I’d still say braces were the worst part of it all…
Jaw surgery is probably one of the most invasive surgeries that exists. You don’t realize how much you use it until you have to have it wired shut, or it doesn’t heal right and you lose all feeling in one or both sides of your face, or even worse you have no sensation but blinding trigeminal neuralgia that decides to fuck up your entire day whenever it feels like it.
For starters, you can’t move teeth that quickly or the root will die. Second, you often can’t perform jaw surgery without moving the teeth out of the way with braces beforehand. 99% of jaw surgeries require minimum 6 months of braces prior to the surgery, and then braces after the surgery to re-align the teeth.
Latest Answers