Most struggle with the difficult semantics of the word and have not heard of it … Interestingly, you might have been seen or treated by an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon without even you realising it or knowing it !
When a dentist is faced with a difficult tooth that requires to be removed, the ‘specialist’ who is called to carry out the procedure … that person is the “Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon”. But that is not all that we do.
Let me break it up for you semantically, before I venture into more details.
“Oral” is pretty obvious and so I am going to skip to the next – “Maxillofacial”. #Maxillofacial is a compound word consisting of “Maxilla” (upper jaw bone) and “Facial” (relating to face). So my work relates to problems of the “maxilla” and of the “face”. “Orofacial” is again a compound word derived from joining “Oro” (related to oral cavity) and “Facial”.
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