The question of whether everyone needs to have their wisdom teeth removed has been debated for many years, but the reality is that nearly everyone will need them out at some point.
Most people need to get them removed when they’re young because there isn’t enough room for them to come in properly. This leads to problems like tooth decay and gum disease, and can cause the need for removal later in life.
The typical wisdom tooth removal patient is a high school or college aged young adult, due to genetics, improved dental care practices, and modern dietary issues. In the past, people didn’t need their wisdom teeth removed because they didn’t have access to dental care, so their teeth would break or fall out.
This meant that the remaining teeth shifted and there was not enough room for the wisdom teeth to come in without problems.
The modern diet is much less abrasive, so our teeth no longer wear from it. Thus, the jaw is about 25% smaller than it was a couple thousand years ago, and the average mouth doesn’t have enough room for the wisdom teeth.
Having wisdom teeth can be a difficult experience for many young adults. Dr. James Babiuk is an expert at recognizing and treating problems with wisdom teeth and extractions.
Impaction, the main reason for wisdom teeth removal, occurs when the remaining adult teeth do not leave enough room for the third molars to emerge, causing the wisdom teeth to push up on the bottom of the nearby teeth.
This pressure can be extremely painful and can cause damage to the nearby teeth or bone loss around the roots of the teeth. If you are having problems with your wisdom teeth, call 815-254-1560 to make an appointment for a consultation with Dr. Babiuk.
Occasionally, the tissue that forms the tooth will break down and can form a cyst or even a tumor in the jawbone.
The wisdom teeth can become partly exposed and angled, creating a trap for food, debris, plaque, and bacteria. This leads to a high risk of infection, especially during late high school or early college years, when stress hormones cause a decrease in immunity. If left untreated, the gum tissue can become chronically inflamed, and even form cysts or tumors in the jawbone.
Wisdom teeth, or third molars, are the last teeth to develop and emerge into the mouth. They typically come in between the ages of 17 and 25 and are the most common teeth to become impacted. An impacted wisdom tooth is unable to fully enter the mouth due to a lack of room on the jawline. If left in the mouth, it can cause unwanted damage to your teeth and other areas of your mouth.
The pressure caused by the wisdom teeth can cause teeth to move out of position, cavities, and even bone resorption in neighboring teeth. Infected wisdom teeth can also generate a fluid-filled cyst, which can destroy the jawbone and damage the surrounding nerves and teeth.
If you’re experiencing pain, swelling, or severe gum sensitivity in the back of your mouth, it may be a sign that your wisdom teeth need to be removed. Even if they are healthy, they can become impacted if there isn’t enough room on your jawline for them to grow.
Your oral surgeon may recommend an extraction if your wisdom teeth have become impacted and are causing discomfort or damage to the surrounding teeth. This can help to prevent further damage and alleviate your symptoms.
For most young people, wisdom teeth don’t fully emerge and are typically angled in a complex position. To fully expose the tooth to remove it, the gum tissue needs to be lifted, and space must be made between the tooth and the bone in order to free it. Often, the tooth must be cut into pieces to remove it.
However, in older people who have been functioning on the teeth, it becomes more difficult to remove them due to age-related changes in the bone.
In 16 year olds, the bone is still very flexible and can be moved to create space, and then return to where it was.
In people over 35, however, there is no flexibility of bone left, so bone removal is typically necessary to break the tooth’s attachment to the bone.
When you schedule a consultation with Dr. Babiuk, an oral exam and 3D CT Scan will help your oral surgeon determine the best course of action for your wisdom teeth.
You will be given a local anesthetic to ensure your comfort during the procedure; and depending on your situation, you may be given sedatives to help you relax.
After surgery, you will need a few days of recovery and may have eating restrictions while your mouth heals. Your doctor will also prescribe painkillers to help you heal more comfortably. Dr. Babiuk is here to make sure your wisdom teeth extraction is as comfortable and stress-free as possible.
When you visit Dr. Babiuk for your wisdom tooth extraction, you can expect an oral exam and 3D CT Scan. This will help him determine the right procedure for you.
Depending on your comfort level, he may use local anesthetic, a mild sedative, or general sedation. Your comfort is important to him and Dr. Babiuk will make sure you are feeling relaxed and at ease during your extraction.
When you visit Dr. Babiuk for a consultation, you can expect a comprehensive oral exam and a 3D CT Scan. These tests will determine if your wisdom teeth require extraction.
To ensure your comfort during the procedure, a local anesthetic will be used to numb the affected area and, if needed, you may also be given sedation so that you can stay relaxed.
Your recovery period may take up to a few days and you may be asked to adhere to certain eating restrictions. To help with any discomfort during the healing process, your doctor will provide you with painkillers.
TheWisdomToothDoc™ technique focuses on minimizing pain and swelling. Although there may be some redness and swelling, we will give you the tools and information you need to get better quickly and comfortably. We will also text you after the procedure to see how you are doing, and you will be able to call our office if you have any questions or concerns.
For most people, they are going to be a little dizzy and a little sleepy for the rest of the day after wisdom teeth removal. There will be an effect on coordination for about 24 hours, so we don’t want people driving, riding a motorcycle, or using power tools, or doing anything else where they could hurt themselves. The residual effect on coordination persists a little bit longer than the residual dizziness and sleepiness, so it’s really important that people follow those restrictions for 24 hours. For reasons unknown, sometimes we will see adolescent female patients become more emotional than usual for a few hours after sedation. It is important to note that the outlandish behavior of people after wisdom tooth extraction typically portrayed on YouTube is not at all a realistic depiction.
The question of whether or not everyone needs to have their wisdom teeth removed has been debated for many years amongst dental professionals. The reality is that nearly everyone will need their wisdom teeth out at some point. Most people need them out when they’re young because they don’t have enough room for them to come in, so they get stuck and cause problems. Some people will have enough room for the teeth to come into the mouth but then they struggle to clean them, leading to problems like tooth decay and gum disease. This leads to the need for removal later in life.
The typical wisdom tooth removal patient is a high school or college aged young adult, who has spacing issues. These arise due to genetics, due to improved dental care practices, and due to modern dietary issues. In the past, no one needed wisdom teeth removal. Most people didn’t have access to dental care, so teeth would break or fall out, the remaining teeth would shift, and there was enough room for the wisdom teeth to come in without problems. As dental care has improved, people have stopped losing teeth at a young age.
Another big factor is the modern diet. People used to eat food that they picked and prepared on their own. Grains were milled between rocks. Leaves and stems were in their vegetables. So they ate dirt and sand and their diet was very abrasive. This has changed and now what we eat is very processed. Our teeth no longer wear from our diet. If we look at the work of the anthropologists who examine human skulls, all the teeth are worn and smaller, so there was room for the wisdom teeth. Human jawbones are actually about 25% smaller now than they were just a couple of thousand years ago because growth is affected by function. Diet was more abrasive, so people needed more chewing force in order to eat. That meant that the jaw would grow bigger and there was more room for more teeth to come in. The average mouth today doesn’t have enough room. The wisdom teeth will form, get stuck, and end up partly covered by bone or by gum tissue.
If you put off getting your wisdom teeth out for too long, your jawbone and teeth start to harden. As the third molars get harder, they get harder to take out, and the process gets more painful and complicated.
The cost of wisdom tooth removal depends on the position of the tooth, whether it has erupted, whether it is stuck, whether it’s angled, and whether it is covered by bone or gum tissue. There are a lot of factors and choice plays a role. Some people only want shots of local anesthetic. Most people have trouble tolerating such an intense removal, so the best way to do things is under sedation. The cost can vary from $1,500 to $5,000, depending on each individual patient’s situation. Typically, dental insurance will cover some of the procedure but not all of it. Some medical plans will provide some coverage as well. Our financial team will help you to get the maximum benefits possible.
If you wait, you are also more likely to have problems after the surgery, such as sinus problems, heavy bleeding, tooth roots being damaged in healthy teeth, and limited jaw movement. You might only have these symptoms for a few days or for the rest of your life.
The majority of individuals have unexposed wisdoms with a high risk of plaque and foreign debris blockage. Consequently, the tissue may become infected. It can also lead to improper tooth positioning and mouth development. Click here for more information.
For most young people, wisdom teeth don’t fully emerge. They are typically angled in a complex position. It’s not a straight up and down erupted tooth. In order to fully expose the tooth to remove it, we have to lift the gum tissue. We typically have to make space between the tooth and the bone in order to free it. Many times, we actually have to cut the tooth into pieces to remove it.
In older people who have been functioning on the teeth, it becomes harder to remove them because of the changes in bone that happen with age. In your typical 16 year old, the bone is still very flexible and you don’t have to do as much removal of bone because you can get the bone to flex and create space, and then return to where it was. In the average person over 35, there’s no flexibility of bone left, so there’s typically a need for bone removal to break the attachment of the tooth to the bone.
Dr. Babiuk is amongst the state’s best qualified oral and face surgeons. He has extracted over 150,000 teeth and trained one of the leading hospitals, Cook County. In addition to teaching anesthesia and surgery at Cook County, he has more than 25 years of expertise in private practice and 20 years of experience in anesthesia. Dr. Babiuk specializes in extractions of wisdom teeth and has a lower rate of complications, post-operative infections, and dry sockets than the national average. Read more about Dr. Babiuk here.
I always recommended that sedation be used unless someone has a medical reason why they’re not a sedation candidate. Sedation is always given as the best option. It’s better to not be aware of what’s going on, in order to have a good experience. If someone has a bad experience, they may develop a fear of dentistry and end up avoiding dental care in the future, which will negatively affect their overall dental health for their lifetime.
If, for whatever reason, someone feels anxiety over the sedation process, they may choose to not be sedated. There are two choices when they’re not sedated. One is using the local anesthetic, Novocaine. They will feel pressure, vibration, water, and the initial anesthetic injections. There is one step between that and being sedated. There’s a mask over their nose and they are breathing a mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide, laughing gas. The result is very minor sedation. You can only feel 90% of what is happening instead of 100%.
If someone decides against sedation, we can’t avoid the use of opioids. Under sedation, we have intravenous line access. We can give medications that are going to reduce the inflammation and pain for many hours after the procedure. Without sedation, we don’t have this access and we can’t give those medications. The average person is then going to need much stronger pain medication.
A General Dentist is the primary care doctor of your oral health. They are trained to restore teeth back to normal form and function. They are trained to replace missing teeth. They have very little exposure to tooth extractions in dental school. Most have only done a handful before graduation. They also have no training in managing surgical complications. While the likelihood of of complications is low, they should be handled by experienced hands. When someone has a problem with an extraction by their dentist, they will need to then find an expert to take over.
Experience is an important consideration for any procedure. The added experience of a seasoned professional reduces your risks and improves your recovery experience.
Not to sound too sarcastic, but, would you want your primary care doctor to perform your bypass?
Since the extraction is generally performed under sedation, you’re unaware of the procedure even being done. We start an IV line and we give you some medications. You fall asleep and we give you local anesthetic while you’re asleep, so you don’t have any awareness of the injections. The areas are numb in addition to the sedation. After the procedure, you wake up feeling numb, as if you had gone to the dentist for some fillings. The local anesthetic wears off over a period of a few hours. We also place long acting local that lasts for 3 days. The sites won’t feel totally numb, instead there will be decreased sensation in the areas to decrease your discomfort.
For healthy people, the risk of an anesthetic problem is between one in 500,000 and one in one million. We are typically working with young, healthy people, which reduces the risk. When a procedure is done under sedation in the office, it is done with the exact same technique that would be used in a hospital operating room, with the same monitoring equipment. In order to be a sedation provider, you have to be trained in it. You need to have staff that is trained in managing emergencies and CPR. You constantly have to retrain and test. Realistically, the potential for an anesthetic problem in an oral surgery office while having wisdom teeth taken out under sedation is very low.
Dr. Babiuk and his staff are widely regarded as the foremost experts in wisdom tooth extractions. They take satisfaction in minimizing complications through careful patient evaluation and have contingency plans for most, if not all, possible complications.
A typical clinic will give opioid prescriptions to mostly young and healthy patients after a procedure. Opioids are one of the most addictive substances available, and prolonged use can be fatal. We are one of the few clinics engaged in the fight against opiates and have carefully developed a safe, comfortable, and opiates-free procedure. Click here for more information.
We prioritize your safety and treat you as if you were a member of our family. We take the time to personalize your procedure and limit your exposure to potentially addictive drugs. Click here for more information on Dr. Babiuk.
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From the initial phone conversation to the post-operative appointment, we take pride in ensuring your satisfaction. Call us today!
After wisdom teeth removal, most patients will see a period of swelling that peaks after about three days. The swelling resolves over a period of about a week and a half. The inflammation that happens from the surgery will lead to pain and discomfort. The average patient of TheWisdomToothDoc will take Tylenol and prescription strength ibuprofen, at the same time, every 6 hours for the first four days. After this we have them transition to an as needed basis.
Typically, a patient who has her wisdom teeth out on Friday will be able to go to work or school on Monday. They will be a little uncomfortable, but still able to do what they would normally do. The average patient will get to the point where they feel normal again within two weeks. Gum tissue healing is about a six-week process. The bone underneath the gum tissue takes about six months for full healing. Those processes are typically not felt by the patient at all.
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