Jaw Surgery Roanoke, VA
 Jaw surgery, or orthognathic surgery, corrects bite and jaw alignment problems that braces alone cannot fix, and Mountain State Oral and Facial Surgery treats these cases for patients across Roanoke, VA. If your teeth don’t meet the way they should, if chewing is real work, or if your bite has never felt right no matter how much orthodontic treatment you’ve had, the problem may be where the jawbones sit rather than the teeth sitting in them.
Most people call it jaw surgery. Surgeons call it orthognathic surgery, and it’s a staged correction rather than a single appointment: we reposition the upper jaw, the lower jaw, or both, then hold them in the new position with small titanium plates and screws. Our orthognathic surgery overview covers the procedure in more depth.
Jaw surgery almost always runs alongside orthodontic treatment, which means your orthodontist and our surgeons work the same case from opposite ends. We handle the surgical half at our Roanoke office on Franklin Road SW, and your orthodontist keeps the teeth moving before and after. The honest headline is that this takes time: most people spend well over a year in treatment from the first orthodontic appointment to the last, and the surgery itself is one day in the middle of it.
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What Jaw Surgery Corrects
 Braces move teeth through bone. They can’t move the bone itself. When the upper and lower jaws are different sizes, or sit in the wrong position relative to each other, orthodontic treatment can camouflage the problem by tipping teeth to meet in the middle, but the skeleton underneath stays where it is. That’s the line between an orthodontic case and a surgical one.
The bite patterns we correct most often in Roanoke are these:
- Underbite – the lower jaw sits ahead of the upper, so the bottom teeth close in front of the top ones.
- Open bite – the front teeth never touch, even with the back teeth clenched, which turns biting into a sandwich into a two-hand job.
- Deep overbite – the upper teeth cover the lower ones so far that the lower front teeth can strike the palate.
- Facial asymmetry – one side of the jaw grew longer than the other, so the midline of the teeth doesn’t match the midline of the face.
- Chewing and speech difficulty – the bite never seats properly, so food stays whole longer and certain sounds take a workaround.
Any of these can also wear teeth down early or leave the jaw muscles aching by the end of the day. Some patients breathe better once the jaws move forward, and in certain cases jaw surgery helps obstructive sleep apnea. Where the wear has already gone far enough that teeth need rebuilding and not just realigning, full mouth reconstruction becomes part of the same conversation.
Is Jaw Surgery Right for You?
Growth has to be finished first, which usually means the late teens. We confirm it with imaging rather than a birthday, because growth finishes on its own schedule and operating on a jaw that’s still growing risks the correction drifting later.
Beyond that, the shortlist is straightforward. You’re likely a candidate if your jaws are visibly mismatched in size or position, if orthodontic treatment has already been tried without settling the bite, or if a dentist or orthodontist has raised the possibility with you. Jaw surgery is not the answer when the issue is limited to crowding or tooth position, which braces and aligners handle on their own.
Your Jaw Surgery Team in Roanoke
Orthognathic surgery isn’t something a general dentist or an orthodontist performs. It belongs to oral and maxillofacial surgery, and our surgeons include board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeons, several of them certified by the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. The current roster is on Meet Our Doctors.
That training matters in a practical way here. Our surgeons handle orthognathic cases across our offices in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, so this is part of the regular surgical workload rather than a case we hand off. Your consultation, your planning review, and every follow-up happen at Franklin Road. Only the surgery itself moves to a hospital, which is where our surgeons usually perform general anesthesia.
We work your case with your orthodontist rather than around them. They own the tooth movement, we own the bone, and the two plans have to be one plan. If you don’t have an orthodontist yet, we’ll help you find one in the Roanoke area before we plan anything, because the orthodontic work comes first.
The Jaw Surgery Process, Step by Step
 Five stages, and only one of them is the operation.
- Consultation and imaging – we take a 3D Cone Beam scan at the Franklin Road office and a digital scan of your teeth with our Trios 5 intraoral scanner. Together they give us your jaws and your bite as one model we can move on screen before we move anything in real life.
- Pre-surgical orthodontics – your orthodontist levels and aligns the arches, which commonly runs twelve to eighteen months. This stage often makes the bite look worse before it looks better, and that’s expected: the teeth are coming out of the compensated positions they drifted into.
- Surgical planning – once the teeth are ready we re-scan and plan the exact movements in millimeters. You see the plan before anything gets booked.
- Surgery – we reposition the jaws and secure them with titanium plates and screws. This runs under general anesthesia, which our surgeons usually perform in a hospital setting rather than at the office.
- Healing and finishing orthodontics – the bone knits over roughly three months, and your orthodontist then does the final detailing, which commonly takes another six to twelve months.
Add it up and most cases run close to two years. That number surprises people, so it’s worth saying plainly: the surgery is one day, and everything else is orthodontics and healing.
Recovery runs in weeks, not days. Expect real swelling through the first week and a soft or liquid diet for several weeks while the bone stabilizes, alongside the pre- and post-op instructions we send home with you. Most people take two to four weeks away from work or school. Our surgeons see Roanoke patients Monday through Thursday until 4:00 PM and Friday until 2:30 PM, which is worth knowing when you’re fitting the early post-op checks around a work schedule.
Benefits of Jaw Surgery
Chewing is the change patients notice first. When the molars finally meet across the whole arch, food breaks down the way it’s supposed to, and the compensating you’ve done for years without noticing simply stops. We hear about it at the Franklin Road follow-ups, usually right around the point the soft diet ends and a real meal is back on the table.
Speech is the second. Certain sounds need the front teeth in a particular relationship, and an open bite or a pronounced underbite turns them into a workaround. Patients in our jaw surgery patient stories describe eating, speaking, and breathing all improving together as the months pass.
The joint strain is the quiet one. A bite that never seated properly asks the muscles and jaw joints to hold a position they weren’t built for, and that shows up as end-of-day aching or teeth wearing flat early. When we go through your Cone Beam scan together, this is usually the finding that moves people off the fence, because the wear pattern is right there on the screen and it doesn’t reverse on its own.
Facial balance changes too, because moving a jaw moves the face sitting on it. We treat that as a consequence of the correction rather than the reason for it. If the profile is the only thing bothering you, this is a long and demanding treatment to sign up for, and we’d rather say so at the consultation than after.
Why Choose Our Surgeons for Jaw Surgery
Orthognathic cases are part of our regular surgical workload, not something we refer out. Our surgeons handle them across our offices in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, which means Roanoke patients get the same surgeons and the same planning process as patients at our home office in Charleston.
The other half of that answer is your orthodontist. Jaw surgery only works when the surgical plan and the orthodontic plan are the same plan, and we’d rather build that relationship before your case than during it. We take referrals directly from orthodontists and general dentists across the Roanoke Valley, and the surgical plan goes back to the referring office before anything is scheduled.
Jaw surgery also isn’t the only thing we do on Franklin Road. If the workup points somewhere else, which happens, the rest of our oral surgery services in Roanoke run out of the same building with the same surgeons.
Jaw Surgery Cost and Insurance
Cost matters, and we’ll be straight with you about how this one works. Jaw surgery usually bills as a medical procedure rather than a dental one, so it tends to run through your medical plan instead of your dental benefits. That catches people off guard, and it’s generally good news.
What you pay turns on which jaw or jaws we move, whether the case also involves the chin, and the hospital and anesthesia charges that come with operating in a hospital setting. Your orthodontic treatment is billed separately by your orthodontist and isn’t part of what we quote, which is worth knowing when you’re adding up the year. Our financial and insurance information covers the plans we work with and the payment options available.
Call our Roanoke office at (540) 283-4940 once you have a diagnosis, and we can walk through an estimate built around your case rather than a range.
Schedule Your Jaw Surgery Consultation
The first appointment is a conversation and a scan, not a commitment. Call our Roanoke office at (540) 283-4940 or request an appointment online. We’re at 1603 Franklin Rd SW, Roanoke, VA 24016. Our hours are Monday through Thursday from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and Friday until 2:30 PM.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I really need jaw surgery, or can braces fix this?
Braces can fix it if the problem is where the teeth sit, and they can’t if the problem is where the jaws sit. The practical test is how far the teeth would have to tip to meet: past a certain point, camouflage either won’t close the bite or won’t hold it, and the case relapses. A Cone Beam scan settles the question in one appointment.
How long will I be off work or school?
Two to four weeks for most people. Desk work at two weeks is realistic, but anything physical, anything that needs clear speech all day, or anything in a dusty environment is closer to six, so teachers and people in sales usually want the extra time. We schedule around school breaks and holidays when the calendar allows.
Will the surgery happen at your Roanoke office?
No. Jaw surgery runs under general anesthesia, and our surgeons usually perform general anesthesia in a hospital setting, so that part happens at a hospital rather than on Franklin Road. General anesthesia is one of the anesthesia options we use depending on the procedure. Everything around the surgery is at our Roanoke office: the scans, the planning review, the suture check, and every follow-up after. You’ll be at our office far more often than at the hospital.
Will my jaw be wired shut?
Usually not. Plates and screws hold the jaws in the new position without wiring the arches together, which is why most patients are on a soft or liquid diet rather than a straw-only one. Some cases use light elastics between the arches to guide the bite while it settles, and those come off to eat. Wiring is the exception now rather than the rule.
Does insurance cover jaw surgery?
Often, when it’s documented as medically necessary. Because jaw surgery usually bills to your medical plan, the approval path looks different from a crown or an extraction: there’s a pre-authorization step, and it asks for records showing functional impairment rather than photographs. Build a few weeks into your timeline for it. Our insurance and financing options list the plans we work with.
What if I am still growing?
We wait, and we monitor. Operating before growth finishes risks the jaw continuing to move afterward and undoing the correction, so a teenage case usually means checking in every six to twelve months with imaging until things settle. That is a normal part of the sequence rather than a delay. At the other end there is no upper age limit.
Is jaw surgery worth it?
Patients who came in for a functional problem are the ones who say yes without hesitating: chewing that took real work, speech that needed a workaround, teeth wearing flat in their twenties. Patients whose main goal was the profile change more often find the recovery longer than they bargained for. That’s the honest split, and it’s why we ask what’s bothering you before we ask what you want changed.
I am an orthodontist. How do I refer a patient?
Our For Doctors section lays out what we need with a referral and what comes back to you. The short version: send records if you have them, we’ll scan fresh at Franklin Road if you don’t, and you’ll have the surgical plan before anything is booked. We stay in contact through the pre-surgical phase so the decompensation timing works on your end. For Roanoke cases, our office line is (540) 283-4940.
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