Motivations and Concerns of Preorthognathic Surgery Patients

This study aims to investigate motivations, ways of gaining information, and concerns for orthognathic surgery of patients with skeletal dentomaxillofacial deformities before receiving the treatment, and to explore directions for improvement in doctor-patient communications in the clinical practice.

Presurgical patients were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their basic information, the approaches via which they knew about the surgery, as well as their motivations and concerns for the surgery.

One hundred ninety two questionnaires were included in the analysis in total. Patients (females: males = 2.69:1) with an average age of 23.79 ± 4.36 mainly regarded facial esthetics (103, 53.65%) as a primary concern. Although about 80.20% of patients accessed medical information through the Internet, it was still an irreplaceable way to know through consulting specialists.

The majority of patients were young, unmarried women without a stable income. For most patients, the primary motivation to receive the surgery was an improvement in facial esthetics and the biggest concern was the operation effect. Access to medical information through the Internet has become very important access to medical knowledge.