We work hard to beautify and preserve the teeth of our patients in Southlake, TX and beyond. However, sometimes it is the best decision for your oral and overall health to extract a tooth. At StarImage Dental Boutique & Oral Surgery, we offer oral surgery to extract your teeth, as well as sedation dentistry to help you feel more comfortable during your surgery.
We do a careful evaluation of every tooth prior to extraction and help you make the difficult decision that it’s time to extract a tooth. Here are some of the situations where this might be necessary.
Threatening Wisdom Teeth
Wisdom teeth are the most commonly extracted teeth. This is usually because the mouth just isn’t quite large enough to accommodate the wisdom teeth, also called third molars. If there isn’t enough room for wisdom teeth, you might experience:
- Crowding and crooked teeth
- Damage to the crown or root of neighboring teeth
- Difficulty cleaning teeth
- Food and debris trapped in teeth
- Cavities
- Gum disease
- Cysts and tumors (typically benign)
Because these conditions potentially threaten more teeth than just the wisdom teeth themselves, we often extract wisdom teeth to protect your other teeth and your overall health. In addition, we can often predict with high certainty many wisdom teeth that will provide future problems. Therefore, we might recommend extracting a wisdom tooth early to avoid difficulties. This not only helps you avoid the above potential problems, it can make surgery easier and more comfortable.
We will help you understand the information we have and how likely future problems are so you can make an informed decision about early wisdom teeth extraction.
Infected or Abscessed Tooth
We might also recommend the extraction of an infected tooth, also called an abscessed tooth. This occurs when bacteria penetrate the interior of the tooth. They grow inside the tooth, killing the living part of the tooth and spreading from there into the rest of the body.This can lead to dangerous, even deadly infections. An infected or abscessed tooth needs to be dealt with either with extraction or with root canal therapy (RCT), which removes the infected part of the tooth and replaces it with inert material.
We might recommend extraction when:
- Infection is too acute and dangerous to wait for RCT
- Your immune system puts you at elevated risk from infection
- The tooth is too damaged for RCT
- You prefer extraction to RCT
In these cases, we often recommend tooth replacement in one form or another, preferably with a dental implant. Often this can be done immediately when we extract your tooth.
Damaged Teeth
Usually, we restore a damaged tooth with a filling or dental crown. However, sometimes a tooth is so badly damaged that we cannot repair it. In this case, we will recommend tooth extraction.
Often, we can replace a damaged tooth with a dental implant the day of your extraction. This lets you have a complete smile immediately, without having to live with a tooth gap you’d have to explain away.
Gum Disease Treatment
Gum disease is the leading cause of tooth loss in adults in the US. Sometimes when gum disease threatens several of your teeth, we might need to remove one or more of them as part of treatment. This lets us more aggressively treat your gum disease, making it more likely to save the rest of your teeth. This can also help you avoid the serious health problems that can come from gum disease.
We also recommend tooth replacement after this tooth extraction, but we might have to wait to resolve gum disease before placing your dental implant. Gum disease can threaten implants as well as natural teeth.
Retained Baby Teeth
As children, we naturally lose our baby teeth, also called primary teeth or deciduous teeth. However, they don’t always fall out. Sometimes, baby teeth stay in place, making it impossible for your natural teeth to emerge. Then we recommend extraction. This will let your adult teeth come in properly.
Sometimes, though, people have no adult teeth to take the place of retained baby teeth. In this case, we might recommend keeping the baby tooth in place for as long as it’s healthy, which could be decades. If the appearance of the baby tooth bothers you, a cosmetic solution like porcelain veneers, dental crowns, or dental bonding might be a better option. Cosmetic solutions are especially good for young people who cannot immediately replace an extracted baby tooth with a dental implant.
Orthodontic Treatment
Usually, orthodontics focuses on moving teeth into place to help them stay healthy and look attractive. However, sometimes your orthodontist might recommend extracting one or more teeth to make room for the rest of your teeth. This can help you have a more attractive and healthier smile, while making orthodontic treatment easier and faster.
Let Us Help You Decide about Tooth Extraction in Southlake
If you think you might have one or more teeth that need extraction, it can be a hard decision. At StarImage Dental Boutique & Oral Surgery in Southlake, we will talk you through your options and help you understand the benefits and tradeoffs in each option. That way, you can make a decision that makes you healthiest and happiest.
Please call (817) 587-4414 or use our online contact form today to request an appointment with an oral surgeon in Southlake, TX.
