When are your teeth considered surgery ready?

[pantlover]

Just a general question that i'm sure new people (myself included!) are curious about.

[chrislee]

when everything is healthy and you're healed up if you had a procedure before.

[pantlover]

i meant in terms of alignment. does the angle of your front teeth matter? or slight crookedness? how does the surgeon/ortho know when you're ready for surgery?

[EWUgal15]

I was told I was ready for surgery when my extraction gaps had closed. For me, that meant I was through the alignment phase as well because I didn't start active gap closure until everything was aligned correctly...no rotation or crowding left over.

[Mart]

I am by no means an expert on this but I imagine they wait until the teeth are in such a position that when moulds are taken and moved into the new bite they fit together as well as possible, that way when the actual surgery is performed the teeth can be moved into the correct position without crooked teeth/misaligned arches getting in the way. I imagine this is why your orthodontist will often take lots of moulds in the months/years leading up to the surgery.

Your teeth my for all intents and purposes look straight at the beginning of your orthodontic treatment for surgery but braces may still be required because the arches may not be wide enough/narrow enough to fit together correctly after they've been moved forwards/backwards/sideways or whatever may be the case. The only way the orthodontist can find this out is to take moulds and artificially perform the surgery on those moulds.

I guess It's this reason why it is very rare for someone to not need some kind of braces work done before their surgery, as their teeth would need to be wrong in such a way that they would fit together perfectly when moved, which as you can imagine is highly unlikely.