Why You Might Need A Tooth Taken Out
Losing your teeth can change your life in a lot of ways.
Emotionally and psychologically, it can make you feel self-conscious about speaking, smiling, and socializing. This can be true for someone who is missing a single tooth or every tooth in their mouth.
Physically, it can change how you speak because your teeth (or lack thereof) affect how you pronounce words. It clearly affects your ability to eat certain foods, since missing teeth make it harder to bite into and chew food.
Hearing that your teeth need to be removed can be hard news to accept. At Sunrise Dental, our preference is to protect and preserve teeth whenever possible. Even so, we recognize that the best long-term solution in certain situations is to remove a tooth or teeth.
It’s not a decision you or any of our dentists take lightly, which is why we are glad to have multiple dentists at each of our offices in Durham, Raleigh, Cary, and Chapel Hill. Our staff is comfortable consulting with one another to make the best recommendations for each of our patients.
Reasons For Extracting Teeth
More often than not we will do everything we reasonably can to keep your teeth in your mouth, which is where they should be.
Nevertheless, every patient and every patient’s situation are different. Here are some of the reasons we may determine that removing a tooth or teeth is the best option for you to keep your mouth as healthy as possible:
✦ You still have your baby teeth.
Your primary teeth start coming in before you reach your first birthday. The rest of these “baby” teeth erupt during the early years of your life.
In a real sense, they are placeholders that fill space until your permanent teeth begin to emerge. Primary teeth play an important role in creating room for your adult teeth and by acting as a guide for where your adult teeth will go.
That’s all well and good until your baby teeth don’t fall out in a timely fashion. In some cases, the adult teeth will erupt behind the stubborn baby teeth. This can complicate teeth alignment, and it can affect the effectiveness of orthodontic care.
In those situations, it may be advisable to remove the baby teeth that have overstayed their welcome.
✦ You don’t have enough room for your adult teeth.
This isn’t always because of baby teeth that don’t want to leave. Some people’s mouths are simply too small to accommodate all of their permanent teeth.
This is another situation that can arise before orthodontic treatment begins. To straighten your teeth, you need enough room in that arch for your teeth to fit. If you have an overly crowded arch, then removing a tooth or a few teeth may be the best solution to create a healthy, straight smile.
✦ You are undergoing cancer treatment.
We don’t want to make anyone feel down. Cancer is a terrible disease, but modern medicine has made it possible for more people to beat cancer than ever before.
In some cases, tooth removal may be needed prior to starting radiation treatment or treatment with certain cancer drugs.
It may advisable to remove teeth in areas of your mouth that may be exposed to higher doses of radiation. In other cases, removing infected teeth may be needed because of the effects certain drugs could have on your immune system. This potentially could increase the risk of an infection spreading.
✦ Wisdom teeth need to be removed.
This may be the most common teeth removal procedure performed in the United States. From looking at skulls of our ancestors, scientists know that modern humans have mouths that are smaller than our predecessors.
As a result, few people actually have enough room for their wisdom teeth to erupt cleanly. Dentists often recommend removing wisdom teeth to avoid long-term complications.
When wisdom teeth don’t have room to erupt, they can be partially or completely impacted. This means they remain (in whole or in part) below the gumline.
This can cause your existing teeth to press into one another. This also can increase your risk for gum disease and other infections.
Removing the wisdom teeth often can save you from those matters.
Remove Only When Necessary
Our Sunrise Dental team wants to preserve your oral health. On rare occasions, this does mean removing a tooth to protect the rest of your mouth.
If you are concerned about your teeth or the teeth of someone you love, please contact any of our dentist offices in and near the Triangle by calling or filling out our online form.
