The Story of a Lost Tooth
It is an established fact that quality of our life depends on what and how we eat and therefore our teeth, no matter what stage of life we are in. The question then is why is it that we still don’t pay enough attention and effort to save a tooth when we have to?
Things to think about:
- The food needs to be chewed to almost a pulp before reaching our stomach for proper digestion. Let’s think of two large crushers that crush things when they bang against each other. What happens if we remove one of them? Can we still crush objects? Let’s apply the same principle to food that needs to be chewed and what would happen if we took out one tooth that bangs on the opposing tooth to crush or break the food we eat. Guess we won’t be able to chew food good enough!
- Add to that, that we are still chewing and eating, so once a tooth is taken out the next tooth over has to do a better job or in other words the workload for the next tooth is doubled. What happens when at work your workload is doubled permanently? Do you work better? Just like anything else, the constant stress on this tooth will catch up and you will be at risk of losing this hard worker tooth at an earlier point in time.
- The adjacent teeth in general will try to compensate for the empty spot created by extracting one tooth. As much as we want them to move and replace the whole tooth that we lost just like it was there, they instead start tilting and try to close that space. This can also lead to spacing and thus disrupt the whole mastication process and alignment of our remaining teeth, depending on the position of the extracted tooth. This can, not only lead to bad chewing efficiency but also temporomandibular joint disorders. (Commonly referred to as TMJ)
- We have lost chewing power also because the teeth in front and behind the lost tooth tilted and so don’t chew like before because due to the tilt, they now touch the opposing teeth very lightly.
- The bone in the empty space starts decreasing in height with time and gums follow it, so you get a dip between two teeth. This makes it difficult for dentists to place dental implants to replace the missing tooth even if the adjacent teeth tilted very less. Moreover, the opposing tooth starts growing down trying to compensate for the missing tooth. So the already crowded empty space becomes more crowded making it virtually impossible to replace the tooth we extracted.
Everything around the extracted tooth has now changed for worse. So now we have gone from eating and enjoying food happily to compromising our quality of life as we grow. As the number of teeth we loose increases, this effect becomes more visible and detrimental to our ability to chew and masticate.
If you or anyone in your family has teeth extracted and are on the above pathway, let’s make a u–turn and get you back to happy healthy chewing and mastication. Next time when someone tells you to save a tooth versus extraction, think twice. Even if we need to extract a tooth because it’s too late to save it, there are many options available to stop this downward spiral that starts by extracting a single tooth.
To learn how we can help you restore your ability to chew and masticate efficiently, please schedule a consultation at Baystate Dental, proudly serving patients in and around Springfield, MA.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Dental Implants, Oral Surgery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
