Jaw Correction - Introduction

The human jaw plays an extremely important role in daily nutritional intake as well as in verbal communication. If the jaw exhibits defective positioning, this can lead to significant impairments when chewing, swallowing, or speaking, which lastingly detracts from one's quality of life. One long term consequence can be disease of the temporomandibular joint, the causes of which include non-physiological stress on individual teeth. In additional to these functional limitations, defective jaw positioning often surfaces as an aesthetic problem due to the fact that upper and lower jaws which exhibit an over- or underbite tend to catch one's eye. Congenital or accident-related jaw anomalies can be corrected using orthodontics, pure surgery or, most commonly, a combination of both methods.^1,2