“Doctor, you are a patriot!”
“Doctor, you are a patriot!” This is what the translator who interpreted for a Chinese patient that I recently performed surgery on said to me. The Chinese patient I operated on was a Chinese person who knew the translator beforehand. This Chinese person was concerned about a protruding mouth but received surgery to correct this protrusion after consulting with me. Surgery to correct protrusions usually involves extracting teeth that are extracted for dental correction, eliminating the gum bone corresponding to the location of the teeth, then pushing the protruding front teeth and gum bone backward and fixating in place. The official name for this surgery is anterior segmental osteotomy, commonly called protruding mouth surgery. This surgery must be performed very precisely and has three-dimensional spatial complexities, making it a difficult operation among facial bone surgeries. Not a lot of hospitals perform this operation due to the highly difficult nature. A person’s mouth makes