Dental Malpractice

[steri]

My wife went for a deep cleaning at a dentist in Massachusetts 1 month ago.

She had a lot of pain during and after that, and she went again to the dentist a week after the cleaning. They told her she has an infection and they put her on antibiotics.

She still experiences pain and we could see that the gum around one of the wisdom teeth is broken/cut and dislocated from the tooth.

They (dentists) insist that there is no connection to the cleaning procedure and they recommend an extraction of the wisdom tooth. She never had problems (cavity, etc) with that tooth.

Should we see a lawyer?

Thank you!

 

[I AM ALWAYS LIABLE]

My response:

Have the tooth pulled, and go on with your life.

Wisdom teeth used to serve a useful purpose, but are now considered vestigial organs. A vestige is a degenerative or imperfectly formed organ or structure having little or no utility, but in the earlier stage of development of a species performed a useful function. The reasons that wisdom teeth are now "outdated" are many. Until quite recently, our diet included mostly very coarse food, as well as impurities such as dirt and sand. This coarseness would abrade teeth so significantly that they would take up less space in the jaw. Permanent teeth were also frequently lost at an early age, which would create more space in the jaw. Because the diet was so coarse and hard to chew, the jaw itself would develop into a larger bone because of this constant workout. All of these factors would create more space for the wisdom teeth when they came in.

The heavily processed diet of today does not produce the tooth abrasion or jaw development that we used to see. Modern dentistry has pretty much eliminated significant loss of permanent teeth at an early age. This leaves us with too many teeth and not enough jaw. The wisdom teeth still develop as they always have, but they have no where to go. When this happens, the teeth are considered "impacted," meaning that they are not in normal position and function.

Besides serving no useful function, the impacted teeth will often cause damage because they cannot be cleaned properly and can collect food debris, bacteria and plaque around them. This can result in tooth decay, gum disease, infection and abscess of not only the wisdom teeth, but of the molars next door and of the surrounding gum tissue. The molars in front of the wisdom teeth are sometimes lost because of cavities and gum disease caused by the inability to clean the wisdom teeth properly. Cyst formation and other destructive pathology are also seen around impacted wisdom teeth.

IAAL