Transatlantic tools of the trade: Anglo-American instrumentation in oral and maxillofacial surgery

Surgeons in the United Kingdom and the United States often perform identical oral and maxillofacial operations with strikingly different instrument sets. The extent and practical significance of this divergence have not, to our knowledge, been previously reported. We conducted a descriptive comparative review of contemporary UK and US practice (2023-2024), cataloguing instruments through clinical observation and discussions with peers and scrub teams, then verifying nomenclature, design, and provenance against reference texts and manufacturers' catalogues. Functionally equivalent but non-identical instruments were paired and profiled for origin, form, and typical use. Findings show a small common core (Freer elevator, Minnesota retractor, Austin retractor, DeBakey forceps, Adson forceps, Metzenbaum scissors, and Mayo scissors) with nearly all other instruments differing, illustrating parallel solutions to the same operative tasks. British instruments and their American counterparts (for example, Molt #9, Woodson #1, Seldin elevator, Molt #4, Dean scissors, Army-Navy retractor, Sweetheart retractor, Sistrunk retractor, Hargis retractor, 301 elevator, and Cogswell elevators) were assembled into a practical compendium, with the aim of encouraging cross-pollination of surgical practice. Awareness of transatlantic instrument choices presents an opportunity to refine one's armamentarium. Through selective adoption of unfamiliar but potentially advantageous instruments, the open-minded surgeon can discover new ways to enhance operative precision, efficiency, or ergonomics.