Finishing procedures in orthodontic-surgical cases

To ensure optimal results, we must do our utmost to achieve targets based on order, symmetry and precision, our ultimate aim being to strive towards the desired harmony, planned contrast and exact proportions. Orthodontic-surgical treatments require specific finishing procedures, which most often call for multidisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary, collaboration. Finishing will involve the dental arches just as much as the orofacial environment. Above all, treatment of this kind demands a highly targeted approach in combination with well-defined and perfectly executed techniques. To finish a case satisfactorily, reasonable targets should be aimed for to ensure they are achieved. One must be ambitious and yet wise. A tight alliance of surgeon and orthodontist will nurture convincing and achievable projects and good, lifelong outcomes. Following the consolidation phase, roughly 4 to 6 weeks post-surgery, we can initiate the final orthodontic treatment, which, in effect, constitutes a mini-treatment in its own right. “Details make perfection, but perfection is not a detail” (Leonardo Da Vinci). “A lucid mind is the ante-chamber of intelligence” (Léo Ferré). In the order of life, every form of unity is always unique, and if each of us is unique, it is because everyone else is too. Ambition, wisdom, lucidity and efficiency will guarantee a successful result, the successful result. We must not be mere observers of our treatments, but the architect, project manager and site foreman at one and the same time. One could talk ad infinitum about finishing orthodontic-surgical cases because everything else leads up to the case-finishing and even the fullest description could never be exhaustive.