Dental Extraction Guide

by: Christine Zafra

If you love sodas and can’t live without them when eating your favorite steak, you better thank Virginia Tech for clarifying the connection of soft drinks with tooth decay. There is none, said the pioneers of the research.

But before you jump around and buy a crate of soda for you personal consumption (really, where do you put those?), here is the catch: that study is only effective for the children, the teenagers and the adolescents. People 25 and up? You better contain your soda intake. Also, your teeth are much brittle than before, so a little carbonated water can wash up the enamel, slowly but surely.

by: Christine Zafra

If you think only the movie Minority Report can predict what’s going to happen in the future, then think twice. This has something to do with a person’s teeth (not pre-crime though) and saliva (again, not the pre-cognitive). Researchers from the University of Southern California said that they have developed something useful for the world of dentistry. With the use of a child’s saliva (a swab or a drop maybe), they can now determine (30 – 40 years from testing) if that child will get cavities, which of the forming teeth will have cavities and how many. Talk about Sci-fi!

There are thousands of dentists and different types of dental professionals today. There are specialists like oral and maxillofacial surgeons, periodontists and prosthodontists.

Everyone is cautioned, though, to choose wisely because a growing number of manufacturers of dental equipment and implants are training general dentists through quick courses on placing dental implants surgically. So if you go for tooth extraction and then implants, you should be 100% sure of your dentist’s training.

Veteran implant surgeons claim that in order to become proficient at implant placement, he or she should have already done hundreds of implants. So do demand from the dentist information like how many implants has he or she performed and how long he or she is doing dental implant procedures.

by: Christine Zafra

Tufts University made a study about the connection of dental problems with being a potato couch. Can you guess what the results were?

Yes, of course, the two are related with each other. And if you guessed that they are directly proportional (if one goes up, the other goes up too), then you are correct again. The longer the hours children (and the adults too!) stay in front of the idiot box, the higher their chances of getting a tooth decay since they eat a lot of calorie packed foods (i.e. junk food etc.). Responsible parents should restrain the hours of their kids in front of the TV, or better yet, give them salad or apples so that they’ll be healthier.

by: Christine Zafra

There is a recent study conducted by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that states that children who do not eat breakfast in the morning, are the ones who are in danger of tooth decay. They have a higher as indicated in the study since they are not living a healthy lifestyle. People from the lower socio-economic strata are experiencing this since they don’t normally have breakfast in the morning. Also children from the higher ups are also in danger of tooth decay if they do not eat healthy foods. Keep in mind that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

by: Christine Zafra

There are a lot of people who avoid the dentist because they have a bad notion of what’s going to happen to them the moment they sit the chair of doom. But that should not be the case. A lot of people develop different kinds of tooth and gum diseases because of this. What the dentists can do is to make them a little less anxious by telling them what can happen in case they don’t go to their dentists regularly. How gross and brutal it might seem, but if pictures of decaying tooth can persuade them, then, why not use it for their own good?

by: Christine Zafra

If you think the dentist can just pull the molars of your teeth and use the same method to pull your canines, wrong. There are different procedures to accomplish these things. Upper molars and lower molars too are being extracted differently. The upper part is much more complicated than the lower one. Since it is situated right below your sinus (maxillary sinus), wrong extraction might get your sinus punctured. This will lead to certain complications and that is the reason why dentists normally tell this to their patients before proceeding the surgery or extraction. Just make sure your dentist is a good one.

When a blood clot fails to form in the socket or if the blood clot becomes too loose to cover the wound, an infection called Dry Socket develops in the tooth socket. When dry socket happens, the infected socket looks empty due to lost blood clot. Around 5% of all tooth extractions acquire this infection.

Before undergoing dental extraction, your orthodontist must first perform an X-ray examination and take your medical history in order to evaluate the condition of your tooth/teeth and the need for dental extraction. Based on these two records, your orthodontist can now fully determine whether or not you need dental extraction.