Dr. Jerry Farrell on Smile Makeovers
We’ve seen that on television: smile makeovers. It was fascinating that invariably the most impressive aspect to the facial beauty makeovers was the dental side of it. There was some … I’m told there was some talk back and forth between the plastic surgeons and the dentists about getting the proper respect or acknowledgement of what was really bringing about those changes, but one level is just having the beauty in their smile. But the unspoken part of it is how getting their facial balance correct also changes the way their body postures on their spine, how you can make somebody look better from a teeth point of view, and they’re still miserable in terms of their ears, if they could have ringing, buzzing, hissing, when their lower jaw’s back.
So if somebody comes in with a class two retruded mandible, which is a good 60%, 70% of the problems that people have in our population, and you just straighten your teeth out, you’ve left an enormous muscular, skeletal burden on their body, on your neck and shoulders—nearly irresponsible in my mind. When we see that Asian population or the people of color, they have great noses, so they have huge Lebron James smiles but they have great airways, so we don’t see those kinds of problems in restoring people when they have good noses and good arches.It’s a completely different kind of challenge than we’ve got the narrow face kinds of problems.
I feel there’s a deep responsibility that be mindful of that stuff and to be a good guy dentist because it’s scary, it’s overwhelming, it’s expensive, it takes time. You need to have a rapport, enjoy who you’re dealing with, and we’ve got work to do if your facial balance is out of whack.
Facial makeovers is a superficial term for “let’s fix some things,“ but more often than not, there’s a fair amount of things that are going on behind the scenes that’s part of our responsibility to deal with it also.