Since losing his teeth, Herbert Griffith has tried just about every smoothie on the market that his older sister could find for him.
Thanks to a newly available surgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Dentistry, Griffith, a 65-year-old oral cancer survivor and fishing enthusiast living in Laurel, has graduated to mashed potatoes.
Griffith lost most of his teeth after being diagnosed with oral cancer in 2022. Radiation treatment, which targets cancer cells but can kill healthy ones in the process, took the rest.
“They just crumbled up,” said his sister Beverly Cole, who has helped manage Griffith’s care since his tooth pain first alerted them that something was wrong. Griffith has difficulty speaking, and Cole, a retired medical manager, often steps in to help him communicate. She has spent much of her career and retirement as a caretaker, first as a hospice worker, then for her mother, and now for Grffith.
To her, he’s just “Herbie.”
Traditional dental implants require drilling into the jawbone to screw in individual teeth, but Griffith’s cancer-riddled bones made that procedure impossible. There wasn’t enough bone to support them. Instead, he became the second candidate in Mississippi for a double jaw subperiosteal, or “on-the-bone” surgery.
Over several months, doctors used advanced scanning techniques to map out the shape of the jaw. Then Griffith’s care team worked with a medical technology company to 3D print a robust scaffold made of titanium alloy that sits on top of what remains of his jawbone. After checking the scaffold’s fit, the team of plastic and oral surgeons can mount a full set of teeth, giving the patient a functional jaw in the same day.
The medical center’s dental school is the only in-state center that performs this procedure, said Dr. Ignacio Velasco, an oral and dental surgeon at the medical school and one of Griffith’s doctors. It is among a handful of medical centers nationwide that have both the infrastructure to take care of patients and the multidisciplinary team of doctors who can perform it.
The surgery isn’t for everyone, Velasco added. But for people who physically cannot undergo the traditional process, it is the only way to regain functional teeth, and thus the ability to chew and speak normally.
With this capability, Velasco said he can keep seeing his oral cancer patients for the whole recovery process. Before, many of these patients endured without a working jaw.
“Now, patients don’t need to leave Mississippi to get a full treatment for their cancer and finally the dental reconstruction,” he said.
A complicated procedure
Dr. Pasha Shakoori, a plastic surgeon who specializes in facial reconstruction, works on these surgeries at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. It’s a complex procedure to pull off, he said. For each patient case, Shakoori said he works with a dentist, an oral surgeon, and an ear nose and throat doctor.
Patients benefit from the speed of the process, Shakoori said. For traditional implants, patients have to wait three to six months for the metal posts to heal before they can get each individual tooth screwed into place. For a full set of teeth, that is time-consuming and expensive, because insurance often only partially covers dental implants.
In 2025, the dentistry school team started offering single jaw subperiosteal implants and completed their first double jaw case in February 2026. Double jaw surgery is more difficult, Shakoori said, because there are literally more moving parts.
“What makes the bottom jaw a little bit more complicated is (that) it moves,” he said. The top jaw is attached to the skull which makes it easier to operate on, Shakoori explained. Plus, it’s helpful to have one set of teeth serve as a reference point for how the two sets meet when the patient bites down or closes their mouth.
Herbert Griffith holds up fish he caught, before his cancer operations. Credit: Courtesy of Beverly Cole“If you’re operating on both, now you’re changing everything.”
A complicated procedure did not surprise Griffith after a difficult medical journey that included an initial misdiagnosis. When the tooth pain first started, Griffith’s dentist cycled him through antibiotics for three months before Cole booked him an appointment with a Hattiesburg-based oral surgeon.
“Dr. York looked at it and he said, ‘That’s cancer,’” Cole recounted.
By the time surgery was an option, Griffith’s jaw had deteriorated so much his doctors needed to reconstruct his jaw from skin and bone from his leg before they could screw in the titanium scaffold. Then, in a rare occurrence, the temporary plastic scaffold broke during his recovery and Griffith had to go through the multi-hour surgery again.
“He’s really been through a lot,” Cole said of her brother. “He’s a trooper.”
Still, while in the waiting room for a follow-up appointment, accompanied by Cole and his girlfriend, Griffith was positive about his procedures.
“They’re going well enough,” he said. “Let me tell you, I have my faith.”
Cole is now trying out different foods with her brother, who eats slowly and carefully, making sure each morsel is soft enough to swallow. Just the other day, she said, “Herbie” was able to chew and swallow one of his favorite desserts: a slice of apple tart.
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