Dr. Jerry Farrell on oral surgery
As we’re doing extractions but trying to maintain the height of the bone and avoid disfigurement that happens from boney changes, we’re doing grafts and suturing. There’s so many things that we can do. We can take loss of a tooth and put in a titanium reinforced membrane that will rebuild that, if we use different kinds of bone grafts. And you start out doing implants but what you find out after about 50 implants is that you have to know about grafting and surgery and oral surgery.
Grafting and the surgery part of dentistry has become huge and necessary because you can only do the clean problems when you can only do the easy implants, and they are less and less the picture when you’re doing real care because people have complicated problems that they’ve let go far too long and you’re inheriting a lot of hot potato problems that need help, and you better have that set of surgery tools in your pocket. It’s really perio—it really is periodontal care, it’s a version of endodontic care—the fixing of those problems is under a number of umbrellas. It’s part oral surgery, it’s part periodontics, it’s part implantology, and that’s a blast, I love it, I love the art of it. And what you can do is find a good dentist first, somebody you trust and enjoy, and then we kind of work through the tough love, fun things that we gotta do to get that gorgeous smile back.