“How do they wire a jaw shut?”

The traditional method is to pass wires between the teeth in the space you would floss to secure an arch bar to upper and lower teeth then wire the arch bars together to hold the jaw still. More modern way is to use bone screws that go in between tooth roots and wires passed around the screws hold the jaw shut.

Thanks for your question! It's actually quite rare these days for us to have to wire a patient's teeth together for any significant length of time after surgery. However, when we do temporarily wire a patient's teeth together, we can use a variety of techniques. Many times patients undergoing reconstructive jaw surgery are wearing orthodontic braces, and we simply use these appliances to wire the teeth together using stainless steel wire loops around the upper and lower braces which are tightened to bring the teeth together into the right alignment. For patients undergoing wiring for a traumatic injury such as a broken jaw, we then have to apply the braces to the jaws using strips of metal with hooks on them that are called arch bars. After contouring the arch bars to the teeth, we then pass individual stainless steel wires around the teeth and the arch bars to secure them in position. We then use stainless steel wire loops to engage the hooks on the upper and lower arch bars in order to wire the teeth together. I hope this helps!

Jaws are wired shut by passing wires around each tooth across the upper and lower jaw to create a bar and then tying the upper jaw wires to the bottom jaw wires with additional wires.