Post-operative Care of Wisdom Teeth Surgery

Recovery may take days or even a week depending on individual and complication of surgery. Often, the dentist will also give medical certificate of up to 5 days. After the operation, it is common to experience pain, facial swelling, limitation in mouth opening, bruising and mild bleeding from the operation wound for 3-5 days.

You can have a speedy recovery and heal faster and beter by following this guideline.

• Rest at home. Avoid vigorous exercises, alcohol and very hot food or drink for the rest of the day to minimise the risk of excessive postoperative bleeding.
• Do not rinse your mouth unneccessarily on the day of the surgery as this may stimulate bleeding.
• No smoking for 24 hours.
• Avoid drinking from straw as it may cause dry socket.
• Take your medicine at the prescribe frequency and dosage.
• Surgery site should be cleansed by rinsing the mouth with saline (salt solution) or a prescribed mouthwash after meals and before going to tbed.
• Do not brush your teeth on the day of surgery. Brushing of teeth resume the following day after the surgery.
• Do not apply hot toel or hot compress to the facial skin area of the operative site becaus this tends to increase the size of facial swelling.
• Do have a soft-food diet. Chewing on the operative site(s) should be avoided during healing period.

Risks and Complications of Impacted Wisdom Teeth Surgery

• Prolonged pain
• Prolonged bleeding
• Prolonged swelling due to oedema or blood clot
• Prolonged period of disability (e.g limitation in mouth opening)
• Acute/chronic/local/general infection
• Medical problems arising during the post-op recovery period
• Injury to adjacent teeth/hard/soft tissues
• Numbness of the lower li, chin and/or tongue
• Dry socket
• Bone infection
• Jaw fracture
• Presence of portion of tooth intentionally left in socket
• Presence of portion of tooth unintentionally left in socket
• Displacement of tooth, tooth fragments into adjacent anatomical sites (e.g airway, gut etc)

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.