Extraction of Wisdom Tooth

Impacted wisdom tooth are often removed because it can cause infection of the gum around the wisdom tooth, tooth decay and an increased risk of tooth decay and gum disease (leading to bone loss) in adjacent teeth.

Wisdom teeth surgery involves making an incision through the gum, removal of bone and/or sectioning of the toooth into smaller fragments to facilitate its removal.

Prior to surgery, your dentist would have taken an x-ray of your teeth. Before he starts on the wisdom tooth surgery, he administer local anaesthesia (LA), in which injections are given to numb your mouth (gum, lips and almost all facial region). There are also complicated cases of removal of 4 wisdom teeth in which patient goes under General Anaesthesia, whereby an anaesthetist administers a full (general) anaesthetic. Patient would be completely ’sleeping’ throughout the procedure. After the anaesthesia, the clinician extracts it out if the tooth is visible. If not, the clinician does an excision (cut) to expose to tooth and then taking it out.

Is wisdom tooth painful?

There have been plenty of horror stories floating around about surgical removal of wisdom tooth. The truth is, removing wisdom tooth can be painless, depending on your luck. How difficult it is for the dentist to pull out the wisdom tooth depends on a few factors, such as the space in the jaw and angle alignment of the wisdom tooth. Also, after the LA, your mouth is so numb that you can't feel the pain but only pressure when the dentist "wrestle" with the tooth. In fact, the injection was alot more painful than the extraction.

Post-op, you may feel slight pain. But don't worry as your dentist will prescribe pain killer.


Have you had your wisdom teeth removed? Click on comment and share your experience.

Wisdom Tooth Pain

Have you been having sleepless night because of the wisdom tooth pain that's bugging you? Pain from erupting wisdom tooth is common and can subside with pain killer. During eruption, the pain last for only a few days.

However, most of the time adult experiences pain of wisdom tooth because of onset of tooth decay. This is one of the problems of tooth decay. Decay wisdom tooth may affect the nerve which causes the pain. In worse cases, it may also affect the adjacent second molar. The adjacent teeth will have a higher chance of decay and will also have to be extracted.

So, get your wisdom tooth extracted if you experience pain and swelling and tenderness around your gums. For most people, wisdom tooth has to be removed because cleaning it thoroughly is not easy and food particles are often trapped because of malalignment of wisdom tooth in our small jaw. Putting off extraction of wisdom tooth will only lead to more problem and severe pain.

The pain from extraction of wisdom tooth is alot lesser than the days/weeks of unbearable pain of decaying wisdom tooth. In fact, the extraction is simpler and lesser pain when it's done early enough. It gets more complicated as you get older because of hardening of the roots of the teeth as the teeth mature.