If you were to take a survey of Colorado residents who have visited a dental office for treatment in the past year, it’s unlikely that many participants would say they enjoyed it. Most people don’t like going to the dentist but like the feeling of having their teeth professionally cleaned. If you go to the dentist for a specific reason and wind up suffering an injury during a procedure, such as a tooth extraction, it’s important to determine whether personal negligence was a causal factor.
When you make a dental appointment, you can expect that your dentist, as well as the entire dental team, will adhere to industry protocol and accepted safety standards. It’s not your job to “police” the hygienist who is cleaning your teeth or the doctor who is repairing a tooth with a cavity. Sadly, substandard care has resulted in dental patient injuries in this state and many others.
Use of forceps on a tooth that needs surgical extraction is dangerous
Perhaps your dentist examined your mouth and determined that one of your teeth needs a surgical extraction. Maybe he or she then decided to try to remove the tooth with forceps first. This is a common dental error that can cause severe damage to the tissue surrounding your tooth.
Additional errors that may occur during surgical tooth extraction
When an oral surgeon is preparing to extract your tooth, he or she may need to “peel back” some of the surrounding tissue that forms a flap in order to have better visibility of the bone. If this procedure isn’t done right, it can make surgery more difficult and can also cause delays in healing, wound necrosis or dehiscence, which is when a wound that is failing to heal bursts open.
Dentists are specially trained to determine a best course of action for each individual patient according to his or her unique mouth structure, health condition and specific dental needs. A failure to properly diagnose a dental need or committing an error that is easily avoidable can result in severe, if not permanent, injury to a patient.
Dental injuries might necessitate further surgery or treatment
Like most Colorado dental patients, you understand that certain procedures carry inherent risks and can also be physically uncomfortable, especially if you have oral surgery. There’s a difference between post-surgery pain that is normal and surgery that leaves you in a worse condition than you were to start.
If that’s the case, you may have suffered a personal injury due to dental negligence. It’s not fair for you to bear the full financial burden of a dental injury that was preventable when a dentist or dental team member’s negligence was the cause. Many recovering dental patients have successfully sought restitution by filing personal injury claims in civil court.
