What is an OMS?
November 2nd, 2012
Well, first of all, welcome to our new website! Our goal is to make our website as up to date and as informative as possible. We will have all pre-office visit forms available, procedure lists and information, insurance lists, and offer as much patient and doctor information as we possibly can! In doing so we will plan to keep an up to date blog entry that intends to cover a vast array of topics from surgeries to common questions to basic health preventative type measures. So with all that being said, here goes my first entry:
Some of the most common questions we often get are ... ”What do you do? Are you a dentist, a doctor, a surgeon? What is a Maxillofacial?”
So, to answer these questions in a short, concise fashion, is a bit difficult, but I thought I’d give it a go. We began formally as a sub-specialty of dentistry that predominantly focused on the surgical aspect of dentistry. This has evolved over the years, as we found a hospital presence that involved fixing “jaw bones.” One of the things most people do not know is that the first plastic surgical specialists arose from oral surgery-from progression of its treatments in the hospitals. Many oral surgeons during the First and Second World Wars were solely hospital commissioned- they were they first ones who really took off with the ”hospital” oral surgical care (facial trauma).
Our specialty has always maintained its dental origin, which encompasses full dento-alveolar surgery. This includes wisdom tooth extractions, bone grafting, dental implant placement and routine oral pathology treatments. However, with the increase load of trauma (thanks to the 1960’s and 1970’s fast cars and no airbags!) an increase of facial fractures were being treated at hospitals all over the country- mostly by oral surgeons. A few factors came into play, these injuries were complex and involved multiple areas of the facial skeleton-our trauma services no longer were limited to just the lower jaw. Complex maxillofacial injuries, involving cheekbones, eye sockets and naso-ethmoidal complexes were all being treated by oral surgeons. Hence, the adaptation to change our specialty name to “Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery”. As we saw an increase in hospital admits from this, many early board certified surgeons begin to push for a “dual trained specialist” which meant adding the MD degree as part of training. This was done as more and more people were treating such complex patients with complex medical issues. So, we saw in the very early 1970’s, dual trained specialists- DDS/DMD with MD’s.
As the complexity of our specialty grew, so did the new types of surgical services. With the advances in maxillofacial trauma, the relative surgical approaches and the vast array of cases we started integrating these surgical principles and started doing “elective jaw” surgeries. Principles of rigid fixation and the advent of smaller surgical plates and screws decreased surgical times and aided with quicker patient return to function. People with facial skeletal growth problems or acquired facial syndromes could now be routinely treated with facial reconstructive surgery or as its known, Orthognathic surgery. Orthognathic surgery became a mainstay in many practices.
It is this blending of our medical surgical skills and our dental occlusal knowledge that has spawned numerous other areas of our specialty. From being able to take hipbone and reconstruct the midface, to doing total TMJ replacement surgery-these are advances that are now common place amongst out training. Our surgical scope and its focus now have dramatically broadened. Our training can last as long as ten years, with predominant focus solely of the maxillofacial soft and hard tissue complexes. Rhytidectomies, otoplasty, and rhinoplasty (face lift, ear pinning, and nose job) are routine and frequent services provided by many of our oral and maxillofacial surgical colleagues.
So to end this quick synopsis, (but a bit winded I will add), it is not uncommon to see an “OMS” and say that’s the one who took out my wisdom teeth, or fixed my broken eye socket; or that’s the one who corrected my mom’s TMJ or the one who reconstructed my cousins face; or that’s the one who fixed your nephew’s cleft lip and palate or perhaps did your aunts facelift ... We are pioneers in facial surgery, this is what we do ... We fix faces, and do it well.
Jayson Terres DDS, MD, FACS, FAACS
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