Our primary goal at Mindful Dental Care is to maintain oral health, and ensure that your teeth serve you as long as possible. However, sometimes the condition and prognosis of a tooth indicates that tooth extraction may be more beneficial.
Signs that your tooth might need to be extracted include:
- Extensive decay or cavity that undermines your tooth structure foundation
- A deep and irreparable crack that runs deep into the root surface
- Advanced stages of gum disease.
- Recurrent breakdown of teeth that are beyond repair
There are three levels of dental extraction:
- Simple extraction
- Complex extraction – may not require tooth division
- Surgical extraction
Simple extraction
Simple extraction, as the term suggests, is simple straightforward plucking of teeth under sufficient local anaesthesia or numbness. The extracted site will experience least trauma, and post-extraction healing is generally fast with minimal discomfort. This is our most preferred method of taking teeth out because we would like to keep life easy and simple.
Complex extraction
A complex tooth problem calls for a more complex procedure. Dental extraction may become a complex procedure if the teeth that need removal have sophisticated anatomical structures, such as curved thick roots with dense surrounding bone. In these cases, we may need to perform a slightly more complex technique such as tooth sectioning to facilitate removal.
Complex extraction requires more healing time and may give more noticeable post-operative symptoms such as pain and swelling. Our qualified dentists will use dental x-rays for assessment of teeth prior to all dental extraction.
Surgical extraction
Surgical extractions are required when teeth are difficult to remove by conventional simple extraction because of certain tooth angulation and poor accessibility. A classic example is a wisdom tooth that has a tilted angulation at the back of our jaw.
In these situations, our experienced dentists may need to perform advanced surgical techniques to remove the difficult tooth.