Bone is the Key of Facial Profile

Besides improving chewing and pronunciation function, patients who seek for orthodontic or surgical treatment strongly hope for beauty upgrade to enhance their life quality and confident. Initial motivation of some patients is improvement of dental occlusion. However, most patients actually wish to improve their appearance. Therefore, the responsibility of maxillofacial medical team should focuses not only on teeth alignment and occlusion but also analysis of dynamic smile, harmony and aesthetics of overall facial profile.

Dr. Hsieh often likes to say that bone is the key of facial profile as the central idea is that, our facial skin, tissue underneath skin and muscle are attached to the bone, while teeth are attached on the jawbone. Therefore, a huge change will be generated to the facial profile by moving the bone with teeth attaching to it (upper or lower jawbone), as shown in figure 1.

Many orthodontists eventually compromise the treatment and adopt non-surgical orthodontic treatment due to various reasons. Frequently, satisfying result cannot be achieved and may result in even worse appearance. Various data reveal that orthodontic treatment alone cannot achieve bone displacement exceeding 0.3cm. Most orthodontists who fear of losing their customers or do not receive training in surgical-orthodontic treatment will not mention and discuss the option of surgical-orthodontic treatment with the patients. Therefore, they will simply “comply with” the patients who are afraid of operation and “force” to adopt non-surgical orthodontic treatment. As a matter of fact, most fear originates from lack of knowledge.

Dr. Hsieh encourages patients to seek more information or inquire for surgery details through face-to-face consultation to eliminate unnecessary fear. Hence, patients can make the most accurate choice, even if they eventually “choose” (but not being forced) to receive non-surgical orthodontic treatment.

Further reading: Wikipedia – search “Orthognathic surgery”