Oral surgery is a branch of general surgery that involves the mouth or structures inside or in close proximity to the mouth. While some dentists are qualified to perform some types of oral surgeries, oral surgery and dentistry are technically not the same things.

A dentist is someone who has graduated from a special school - a school of dentistry - in order to learn how to perform necessary procedures on the tooth itself. This includes cleaning teeth, filling cavities, performing root canals and applying crowns and bridges. An orthodontist, like a dentist, has gone to a special school to learn his skill, but is different from a dentist. An orthodontist is someone who specializes in the alignment of teeth within the mouth. You would go to an orthodontist, for instance, if you needed braces.

Oral surgery, however, often involves more than just the teeth. Wisdom tooth extraction, in which wisdom teeth are cut out of the gums, is a simple type of oral surgery sometimes performed by a dentist in a dental office. Correction of a severe overbite or under bite sometimes requires that the jaw be broken and then reshaped; this is a type of oral surgery generally performed by an oral surgeon (a medical doctor) in an operating room.

Another common type of oral surgery generally performed by a medical doctor is a tonsillectomy, in which the tonsils are removed because they repeatedly become infected and enlarged, causing recurring problems with breathing and swallowing. One type of oral surgery that is becoming increasingly common is for correction of "Obstructive Sleep Apnea" or OSA; in this type of oral surgery, excessive soft tissues of the palate (the roof of your mouth), the uvula (that little thing that hangs down from the back of your mouth) and the tonsils are cut away in order to provide better flow of air to the lungs during sleep.

Less commonly, oral surgery can mean "excision" (or removal) of a tumor or reconstructive oral surgery after severe trauma to the face and mouth. These types of oral surgery are considerably more complicated, of course, than a dental extraction or tonsillectomy.