For patients who have suffered from an injury to their teeth, jaws, or face, our highly trained oral and maxillofacial surgeons can safely address your facial injuries so you can once again look and feel like yourself. This is crucial because facial injuries cause not just physical, but emotional trauma alike, affecting long-term mental and physical health.
Our experienced team is acutely aware that a healthy outcome depends on how your treatment restores your appearance and function. This means having prompt emergency care, acute phase treatment, long-term reconstruction, and rehabilitation to ensure an optimal outcome.
Treating Maxillofacial Injuries
We are highly skilled and experienced in diagnosing and treating various types of facial and jaw injuries including jaw or facial bone fractures, fractured or displaced teeth, and lacerations of the face and oral tissues.
Soft tissue injuries
Most lacerations to the face and many injuries to the lips, tongue, cheeks, or gums require suturing to repair. It is important that this is done in a timely manner to reduce the risk of infection. Antibiotics may also be prescribed to help reduce this risk.
Bone injuries
Fractures of the bones of the face and jaws can be treated in a variety of ways depending on the nature of the fracture, the amount of displacement and position of the bones, and the patient’s overall health. For jaw fractures, many times the bones are immobilized by wiring the upper and lower teeth together for a period of time. In other cases, small bone plates and screws are used to hold the bones in positions so they can heal. In still other cases where the bones aren’t displaced, the bones can heal in position if treated only with restricting the diet to pureed foods.
Tooth injuries
Displaced teeth can be treated by splinting them together, most often using a flexible wire and bonding material. If a tooth is avulsed (knocked out), it can often be reimplanted if it is treated as soon as possible (within an hour is ideal). If this happens to you or someone you are with, the tooth should be placed in milk or saliva and you should seek treatment right away. Also, it is important not to scrape or clean the tooth aggressively, because that will reduce the chance for the reimplanted tooth to survive long term. Additionally, in most cases of severe dental injury, root canal treatment will need to be done within a couple of weeks.
We hope you never require treatment of a facial injury, but rest assured that the doctors at Loudoun Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery will take excellent care of you or your loved one, should the situation arise.