I am in my mid thirties and have always been nervous about getting my wisdom teeth out. All of them are impacted. Now I’m told I have a small infection on one of them, but the oral surgeon is warning me that it is about one millimeter from a nerve called the inferior something nerve. How much danger is this? Can I just take antibiotics for the infection?
Rose
Dear Rose,
Impacted Wisdom Teeth
We’ll get to the nerve issue in a moment. Let’s start with the antibiotics. That won’t work. Well, it will hold the infection at bay until you can get the wisdom tooth extracted, but as soon as you run out of antibiotics the infection will flare back up again. You’ll have to remove the infected tooth. Given your age, I’m going to recommend that you get all of the wisdom teeth out.
The ideal time to get your wisdom teeth out is your late teens and early twenties. After that the chances of complications go up every five years. If you wait until you hit your forties, there are serious chances of complications. If they are all impacted, it is only a matter of time until the others get infected. You’ll want to extract them before there is a dental emergency and you have less control over the circumstances.
As for the nerve. It’s called the inferior alveolar nerve. Oral surgeons tend to overstate the risks because we live in quite a litigious society. Proclaiming the greatest possible risk reduces the chance of a malpractice lawsuit. A skilled oral surgeon should not have any problem with a nerve that is a full millimeter away. That is a much larger measurement to a dentist than to most people.
In order to hit the nerve, your surgeon would either have to take the tooth out and then drill down another millimeter (a completely mental thing to do) or he’d have to break the tooth and then put downward pressure on the broken tooth fragment. That would be completely contrary to his or her training. Skilled dentists and oral surgeons have taken out wisdom teeth that were literally sitting on the nerve without any issues.
I hope this puts you more at ease. Your safest option is to remove your wisdom teeth now.
This blog is brought to you by Lexington, KY Dentist Dr. James Williams.