As you head through your teens and early twenties, we can help you track the arrival of your wisdom teeth. This third set of molars may disturb your dental alignment and oral health if they appear to crowd your existing adult teeth. By receiving regular dental checkups, we can take imagery of their travel and help you decide whether or not to extract them. Removal can prevent painful complications of the eruption as well as protect the enamel of your existing smile. By examining your jaw, we may even discover that you do not have these teeth and should not worry about their arrival. Either way, proper planning helps you prevent damage that can require more involved treatment later down the line.
At your Cerritos, CA dental practice, we encourage teenage patients to stay on top of their routine dental checkups. In addition to regularly cleaning your smile, your exam provides an opportunity to create a record of your smile’s development. This includes tracking your third molars to plan for and prevent any potential damage.
Tracking The Arrival Of Your Third Molars
When you first visit the dentist as an infant, we begin examining your smile to see that your teeth are arriving and falling out as expected. We take time to teach you the importance of preserving your smile to prevent damage from impacting its function. As you head from childhood into your teenage years, we continue with the same standard of care and explore orthodontic correction and track your wisdom teeth. While braces help pull your smile into a desirable position, monitoring your third molars prevents them from knocking your smile out of alignment. Simply put, your jaw may not contain enough space to hold an additional four teeth. By crowding your teeth, your smile becomes more difficult to clean and can increase your chances of tooth decay and gum disease.
Extracting Your Wisdom Teeth
If we decide to remove your third molars, we begin by applying anesthetics to prevent pain during your procedure. While you will remain awake during the extraction, we can provide dental sedation if you experience anxiety at the thought of oral surgery. After we finish the procedure, we will give detailed instructions on protecting your open sockets as you heal over the coming weeks. By sticking to a soft diet, you can prevent hard material from injuring your mouth. We insist on avoiding suction to help prevent dry sockets. This means not using any straws or smoking while you recover from surgery.
Speak With Your Cerritos, CA Dentist About Removing Your Third Molars
Tracking your wisdom teeth can help you prevent damage to your smile and misalignment of your bite. To learn more about how we can treat this issue and plan a removal, call your Cerritos, CA dentist’s office at (562)584-4082!
