You might panic when your dentist tells you you need a tooth extracted. You’ve heard tooth extraction is painful and changes how you look, talk, and eat. Despite advances in oral care, myths persist about extraction. We debunk them.
Nobody wants to lose a permanent tooth, and yet 18% of women and men in the United States who were older than 75 had lost all their teeth when surveyed between 2015 and 2018. Adults aged 20-64 have an average of 25.1 teeth out of the full set of 32 (including wisdom teeth).
No Tooth Fairy makes you feel better about losing a permanent tooth — especially if you lose it to extraction — but dental professionals have made the process easier. We also never recommend tooth extraction unless necessary. We do whatever’s in our power to save your natural tooth
Addie Chang, DMD, and our expert dental team want you to keep as many teeth as possible. At our Tukwila, Washington, practice, we offer teeth preservation strategies and extractions.
If you've been told you need an extraction, you may be plagued by myths about the procedure. Here are four of them, as well as the facts that debunk them.
Thanks to advances in sedation dentistry, tooth extraction is no longer the arduous and painful procedure it once was. When extraction is the best solution to preserve oral health, we offer nitrous oxide (laughing gas) or oral sedation.
If you choose oral sedation, you take it shortly before the procedure. Once you’re relaxed, you’re ready for your extraction. Afterward, you need somebody to drive you home because you’re groggy.
Nitrous oxide works immediately. You inhale an odorless gas. You’re not groggy when it wears off, so you can drive home.
Both types of sedation not only deal with pain but they calm your anxiety, too. Nitrous oxide gets its nickname “laughing gas” because you feel euphoric.
Wisdom teeth are vestigial molars from when we needed powerful jaws to chew fibrous tubers and tough meats. Since our ancestors turned away from hunting and gathering toward farming, our diets become so easy to chew that our jaws have weakened and narrowed.
When wisdom teeth erupt (or try to), they often don’t have enough room in your mouth to take their places in your teeth arches. Instead, they get caught under the gum line and must be surgically extracted.
However, if you have a large enough jaw, your wisdom teeth may come in just fine. When your wisdom teeth aren’t impacted and don’t crowd your other teeth, it’s “wisest” to just leave them in place.
Dr. Chang explores all other possibilities before recommending an extraction. She aims to preserve and restore a tooth rather than extract it whenever possible.
If your tooth is damaged by decay or trauma, she may recommend a root canal with a crown to strengthen it while keeping its original root. If the damage is minor, she may be able to repair it with bonding or veneers.
She doesn’t recommend extraction lightly. However, there are times when extraction is the only real solution. If your tooth is so decayed that it can’t be saved, it must be extracted to avoid infecting your other teeth.
You have better alternatives if you’ve avoided your extractions because you dread wearing dentures, which could change how your mouth looks and feels. We can create a dental bridge to span your gap with natural-looking false teeth.
Even better, if you have enough healthy bone in your jaw or can undergo a bone-grafting procedure, you may qualify for a dental implant. Dental implants are titanium screws that we surgically insert into your jawbone to act as artificial tooth roots. We then cap the implants with individually crafted tooth-shaped crowns.
Dental implants look and feel just like natural teeth. You also clean them as you would natural teeth, with twice-daily brushing and flossing and twice-yearly visits to your dentist.
Do you have an aching, decayed, or broken tooth? Don’t delay an extraction if you need to preserve your oral health. Contact our knowledgeable dental team for tooth preservation or extraction by phone or online today.
