Splints

[Helen82]

I'm having double jaw surgery on Tuesday, and following lots of problems with taking molds/impressions, I went in a couple of days ago to check that the wafers and splints fitted okay. The top jaw splint seemed to fit okay but the ortho couldn't get the lower splint to fit. He kept shaving bits of the plastic off til he could get it on, but even then it was very, very tight, and when he pushed down on one side to make it fit it kept pinging off on the other side. His attitude was "it'll do" and I didn't want to challenge him as I didn't want my surgery to be postponed.

But now I'm having a bit of a panic about how long I'm going to be wearing a painful, ill-fitting splint for after surgery, and whether this will mess things up. Anyone else had any splint problems or can someone at least tell me to stop worrying and over-thinking things?!

[Nozzelnut]

From what I've been reading, most folks only have the top splint wired in after surgery.

[sirwired]

It must be a kind of splint I'm not familiar with; I always thought the splints were produced from your models after the surgeon has done practice surgery on it. (As in, it's for where your teeth are supposed to go, not where they are.)

[Poll]

There is a risk of more complications if the splint does not fit properly. Not all the risk are surgical. There are non-surgical risk factors too. My splint had also some problem and my orthodontist took just new impressions. If the splint does not fit properly then you may need some extra orthodontics after the surgery because bad splint may give unanticipated result. I do not want to scare you but my orthodontist had some bad competence issues.

To my knowledge the orthodontist has to do a lot of calculations for correct splint because its angle is important for patient jaw joint dynamics later.