Depending on your specific oral health needs, the overall goal of your dental care may be one of two things – to prevent problems from occurring, or to prevent them from growing more severe. In some severe cases of oral health problems, the only viable way of preventing further harm to your oral health is to extract a compromised tooth before it can lead to more trouble. Today, we take a look at a few such cases, and what tooth extraction can specifically help you save your smile from in each one.

Collateral damage from broken tooth structure

Being broken isn’t always a good reason to extract a tooth. In fact, most teeth that are fractured or broken can be successfully fixed and saved with the right custom-designed restoration. However, restoring a damaged tooth requires that there be enough healthy, natural tooth structure remaining to save and to support the restoration. When teeth are too severely damaged to restore, their damaged parts can sometimes become a threat to surrounding tooth structure and oral tissues. If the tooth can’t be saved, then you can save the rest of your oral health by extracting and replacing it as soon as possible.

The threat of severe tooth infection

Some teeth can be compromised due to structural damage, but more commonly, they’re threatened by progressive infection in their structures. Known as tooth decay, such an infection can progress further through your tooth structure the longer it’s allowed to remain. If tooth decay is detected and treated early enough, you have a good chance of saving and preserving most of your healthy, natural tooth structure. However, severe cases of tooth decay can make saving the tooth impossible, and in extreme cases, could pose a risk of the tooth’s infection causing subsequent problems for your overall oral health.

Subsequent problems from impacted teeth

Though it isn’t as frequent as tooth decay, the impaction of third molars (or wisdom teeth) is also a common reason for some people to need tooth extraction. Wisdom tooth impaction occurs when there isn’t enough room at the end of your dental ridges for the third molars to erupt properly. Instead of erupting, they can become impacted by the molars already present, becoming stuck within your jawbone structure. The more the tooth continues to grow and develop, the more it can push against your teeth and jawbone structure, leading to significant discomfort and threats to your oral health. Because of this, extracting them is a common method of dealing with wisdom teeth, and should be performed before the wisdom teeth can cause severe complications.

Save your smile with tooth extraction

In some severe cases, tooth extraction can help save your smile from several problems resulting from compromised tooth structure. To learn more, or to schedule your appointment, call Healthy Smiles in Gary, IN, today at 219-938-2637.