Help With Healing After Having Your Wisdom Teeth Removed
When you have a wisdom teeth removal, you may not feel like you have been through a major surgery, but you should still take the time to allow your mouth to heal properly. If you don't allow proper time for healing, you could end up with complications, including excessive bleeding and infection. Knowing what to do to promote healing will help you achieve the most rapid, uneventful recovery.
Don't Brush
There are few times when a dentist will tell you not to brush, and removing wisdom teeth often requires your dentist to cut open your gums to access the teeth. To aid in healing your dentist will stitch these incisions shut after the procedure. While the stitches will promote clotting and rapid healing, aggressively brushing your teeth can rip open stitches and scrape away blood clots. Thus, you should wait for a couple of days before you start brushing so that your wounds have time to start healing.
Avoid Crunchy or Sticky Foods
Brushing is not the only thing that can scrape away clots. If you start eating crunchy foods, you can irritate your incisions and/or cause them to start bleeding again. Sticky foods can likewise irritate your wounds, but they can also stick to your teeth and/or stitches and promote infections. Thus, you should stick to soft foods such as pasta to allow your teeth to heal properly.
Avoid Straws and Cigarettes
You might think that sucking on a milkshake would be a good idea after removing your wisdom teeth, but the sucking action can make clots fail and cause your wounds to start bleeding again. Milkshakes are especially problematic in that the thick milkshake makes sucking difficult and can irritate your cuts more than a thinner liquid would. Even the sucking motion involved in smoking a cigarette can cause problems for your teeth, and the chemicals in cigarettes will do nothing to promote healing, so smoking should be on the cease list too.
Rest
Your doctor will prescribe at least a few days of rest. Heed this advice. If you try to do too much too soon, your risk of complications increases. Don't try to rush back to school or work.
Having your wisdom teeth removed should be a minimally invasive out-patient procedure, but you still need to be careful. Excessive bleeding and infection can cause some serious if not life-threatening complications. Thus, you should play it safe after having your wisdom teeth removed and stop brushing, avoid sucking on straws and cigarettes, and take a few days to recoup.
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