coronavirus

Should you Delay a Tooth Extraction if you recently had COVID-19 (Coronavirus)?

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An interesting article titled “Cavernous sinus thrombosis and blindness in a recovered (COVID-19) patient post simple tooth extraction: A case report,” is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and currently available in pre-proof form, written by Mohamed Abdelmoiz, Ahmed Nagi Alghandour, and Amr Gibaly (2022). The article discusses a case report the authors document where a man lost vision in one eye after having a tooth extracted after he had recently recovered from COVID-19 (Coronavirus). Based on this article the authors feel that patients who had recently had COVID-19 and also have diabetes should delay having tooth extractions performed for a period of time after recovering from COVID-19. In the article, the authors describe a 69 year old man with well managed diabetes who was admitted to a hospital due having hypoxia and fever. He was … Read more

Pandemic Precautions: How Safe is a Visit to the Dentist for Removing Your Wisdom Tooth?

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The pandemic has made regular life difficult, and even something as important as going to the local dentist for a regular checkup has not been exempted from that effect. This brings us to a very real and tricky question: is it really safe to go to a dentist when COVID-19 is running rampant everywhere? Even more importantly, how safe is it to get your wisdom teeth removed right now? The Answer is Highly Variable There isn’t a singular “yes” or “no” answer to this question, which could be taken as applicable across all dental clinics in the US. It depends on multiple factors and variables that we cannot control. Fortunately, there are also multiple other factors that we can control to keep ourselves relatively safe in any environment, including the dentist’s clinic. As to the question of whether removing a wisdom … Read more

Cosmetic Dentistry in the Era of COVID-19

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With coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the U.S. continuing to reach record highs – averaging over 100,000 cases this past week in the U.S., as shown for example by the New York Times, you may be surprised to hear that many dentists are reporting a boom in interest in cosmetic dentistry. As has been discussed before on this site, this is because of widespread adoption of teledentistry, see the prior post Delivering Dentistry and Counseling to Patients using Telemedicine. This is also known as the Zoom boom, due to the popularly of software made by the company Zoom Video Communications, Inc., although many other video conferencing platforms exist such as WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Skype. Patients also have extra money to spend, that may have been used in the past to spend on travel and leisure activities that now … Read more