Wisdom Teeth: Should You Remove or Keep?
Aug 07, 2023
If you still have your wisdom teeth, you might be wondering if they ever need to be removed at all. While wisdom teeth extraction may seem like a teenage rite of passage, not everyone even gets all their wisdom teeth. In fact, studies show that up to 37% of people never get all their wisdom teeth.
However, if you do have all of yours still, is it necessary to remove them? At Llanos Dental Group in Miami Lakes, Florida, Laura Llanos, DMD, and the rest of our team want you to know all the benefits of keeping or removing your wisdom teeth so you can make an informed decision when it comes to your oral health.
Your wisdom teeth are the third row of molars that grow in your mouth either during late adolescence or early adulthood. While sometimes all the wisdom teeth grow in and they’re healthy and beneficial, in many cases they don’t come in correctly and can cause issues.
Some of the complications wisdom teeth can cause include:
If your wisdom teeth never fully poke through, cysts might begin to form which can cause severe pain. These cysts can also start to damage your jaw and surrounding teeth and can lead to gum disease.
Wisdom teeth that only partly emerge can cause your gums to swell, making it difficult to brush not only your partially erupted wisdom teeth but also your surrounding teeth. This increases your risk for cavities.
Should your wisdom teeth fully grow in, you may experience shifts in your existing teeth, and they can become misaligned. This might require you to need treatment to straighten teeth back out.
If you experience any of these things or your wisdom teeth are causing you pain in your mouth or sinuses, you probably need to have them removed.
If your wisdom teeth are healthy, they’re fully grown in, and they’re not causing any problems with oral hygiene or overcrowding with your existing teeth, it’s fine to keep them as long as there’s no indication that they will cause problems down the road.
Avoiding oral surgery also keeps you from having to recover from the surgical process and all the possible complications that can come with it such as pain and swelling, dry socket, or infections.
If you still have your wisdom teeth and you’re wondering whether or not you should have them removed, contact our team to set up an appointment so you can get more information. You can do this over the phone or online today.