When Tooth Extraction is the Best Option

Your teeth are tough by design and engineered to go the distance with you. But life doesn’t always go according to plan, sometimes rendering a tooth more of a liability than an asset. In these cases, extraction often poses the best solution, sacrificing the one for the good of them all.

At Charlotte Dental Implant Center, under the experienced leadership of Dr. Ramesh Sunar, our goal is to provide the necessary dental services to our Charlotte, North Carolina, area patients that allow them to chew, speak, and smile with confidence. To do this, there may come a time when extraction is the best avenue for preserving your overall oral health.

Here’s a look at when tooth extraction is your best option.

Late arrivals

While most of your adult teeth take up their positions by the time you enter adolescence, your final molars, or wisdom teeth, like to make a late entrance — usually between the ages of 17 and 25. Because of their tardy arrival, they often encounter problems when they try to erupt, leading to wisdom teeth that:

• Become impacted

• Come in sideways or at an angle

• Don’t have enough room to erupt

In these cases, we go in and remove the tooth in order to avoid problems with your surrounding teeth, which are already firmly in place at this point. This also means that you won’t miss these teeth since you’ve been functioning perfectly well without them.

Damaged goods

While your teeth may be tough, they can’t withstand everything, such as impacts with a hard surface. If you’ve had an accident where your tooth was severely cracked or broken off, and it’s beyond saving, we’re better off removing and replacing the entire tooth. By taking this route, we help you avoid potentially serious problems down the road, like infections, abscesses, and decay.

A slow erosion

If you have extensive decay in your tooth, and our repairs aren’t able to keep up with the damage, we typically recommend removing the tooth. While our goal is always to preserve your teeth, which we can do through fillings and root canal procedures, decay-causing bacteria are aggressive and opportunistic, looking for even the smallest weak spots where they can get in and wreak more havoc. 

But there’s only so much we can do through repairs, and each time we go in to make another, your tooth’s defenses grow weaker. In some cases, there simply may not be enough of your natural tooth to repair, which makes extraction your best option so we can stop the decay from spreading to your surrounding teeth.

Gum disease

If you have advanced gum disease, called periodontitis, it can lead to bone and tissue loss, which threatens the very foundation of your teeth. As your teeth lose their support from below, they can loosen, often inviting more bacteria in and putting you at risk for further infections and decay.

If this happens, we may decide that extraction is the best way to solve the problem, allowing us to prevent your gum disease from progressing. As well, at this point, you’re probably impacted by the instability in your teeth, which affects how you speak and chew. By extracting the compromised teeth, we can restore form and function with prosthetic alternatives.

However we arrive at tooth extraction, rest assured that we have plenty of replacement options, especially dental implants that are almost as good as the real thing.

To learn more about our tooth extraction services and implant replacement options, please give us a call or request an appointment.