I am 26 years old and have impacted wisdom teeth. All four teeth are impacted but only two of them are bothering me. I’m having them extracted and am wondering about a couple of things. First, should I have all of them extracted at the same time or just the ones that are bothering me? Second, one of them has a root that goes past a nerve. The dentist suggested that we can either try extracting the whole root or leave part of the root so that we don’t go near the nerve. Is one better than another?

Kaylie

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Dear Kaylie,

I am going to recommend you get all of the impacted wisdom teeth extracted at once. While the other two wisdom teeth are not bothering you now, they are impacted which means they are very likely to bother you in the future. What you don’t want is to wait until they do and then you have a dental emergency on your hands. There’s a very good reason to all of them now.

At the moment, you are at a good age for these extractions because the bone is still relatively pliable and you don’t have as much cementum built up on the roots of your teeth. Once you hit 30, your chances of complications double from a wisdom tooth extraction. They’ll double again about every five years after that. You are much safer getting them out now.

As for the root by the nerve, It is okay to leave the root, but tell him not to leave the whole root. Instead, he should just leave the tip. This way there is less chance your body will see it as a foreign object that needs to destroyed.

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