Your teeth, meaning every tooth in your mouth, have the capacity to last you a life time.
That's right, a life time, but things can and do go wrong with our teeth.
Look after your teeth and they will be with you for a lifetime most likely.
A tooth may get knocked out playing soccer, a tooth may develop a cavity, hormones may deprive the teeth of their strength during pregnancy, a tooth or teeth may become discolored, but this tooth and teeth web site is all about keeping your teeth unto death and keeping those teeth looking good.
Preserving your teeth against the ravages of tooth and teeth diseases is of utmost importance, for every day of your life your teeth are attacked by disease processes that have the ability to destroy your teeth, some perhaps beginning when you were a baby in the womb.
Gum disease can start when you are a teenager, but not show itself for another thirty years, but it can cost you all your teeth!
Some of the teeth disease processes occur silently, over a long period of time, while some are excruciating painful and fast acting. The following on impacted wisdom teeth is a classic example of the need to do preventative dental treatment, to save other teeth.
Impacted Wisdom tooth or teeth
Impacted wisdom teeth often require an operation to remove them, so as to save the other teeth next to them.
In the X-ray picture photo above, the impacted wisdom teeth are clearly marked. Although the impaction of the wisdom teeth occurred in the teenage years, have created no symptoms or problems as yet, the wisdom teeth are are now showing the need for a dental operation under general anesthetic to remove them.
Yes, 40, 50 years after the wisdom teeth impacted, the bottom two need to come out. As can be seen from the tooth X-ray, the top two wisdom teeth, although impacted, have not pushed into the neighboring teeth, so are safe to leave.
The bottom two impacted wisdom teeth are a different matter, they have become over cozy with their neighboring teeth - molars. In doing so, an area of possible infection has been created, which if it - the infection - were to set in, would mean losing the impacted wisdom tooth and the molar next to it. Further, because the immune system slowly weakens over decades of life, the threat of infection becomes higher and higher.
To preserve the good molars, means preventative dental work is needed - to cut the bottom two impacted wisdom teeth out.
If you thought, well, why not get rid of the molars, as they both have fillings and let the wisdom teeth grow through, well, it is not going to happen. If you look at the roots on the wisdom teeth they are quite stunted and badly formed, the wisdom teeth would never break through the gum line to see the light of day.
