Behind the Scenes of Facial Trauma

There’s more to treating facial trauma than stitching your wounds and preventing scarring. We have many more concerns about the functionality and long-term health of your facial structures, and our treatment methods go above and beyond to make sure that your injuries are healing properly. Here’s a behind the scenes look at what goes into treating facial injuries!

• When treating soft tissue injuries, such as burns, lacerations, bruises, abrasions and avulsions, we have to protect your nerves, salivary glands and salivary ducts from harm so that your injury doesn’t produce permanent damage.
• It’s important for us to make sure your airways are not damaged or obstructed. Compromised airways can be caused by bleeding, swelling of tissues, damage to facial structures or presence of foreign objects. Our team can remove foreign objects either manually or by using suction tools to free up your breathing passages. For bone injuries, moving bones back into place can also relieve airway obstruction.
• Because traumatic injuries make you more susceptible to infection, we may prescribe antibiotics as a preventative measure. Patients who haven’t been immunized for tetanus within the past five years may require a tetanus shot along with their treatment.
• We have to treat bleeding before we can get you on the road to recovery. We may have to drain hematomas to promote healing because, unlike bruises, hematomas don’t always repair themselves. In rare cases we may have to control severe bleeding to prevent the body from going into shock, although less than 10% of patients experience profuse bleeding from facial injuries.
• Trauma can affect the function of your facial structures, including your jaw function, breathing and sense of smell. Instead of using casts, which are only effective for extremities, our team stabilizes facial structures for proper healing by wiring the jaws together or through the surgical placement of small metal plates and screws.

Whether you’ve sustained a facial injury from a fall, motor-vehicle or sports accident, or violent interaction, we treat every aspect of facial trauma to make sure we leave you with results that eliminate all reminders of your injury!