Gum surgery after gum disease

[Chloe C]

Hello

I suffer from my gum disease and I have been seeing a gum specialist who has been trying hard to stop my gum disease. He has been sedating me with oral sedation and has been doing deep gum cleaning to stop my gum disease.

Lately he told me that there a few areas in my mouth that need gum surgery to rectify the gum disease in these areas. I have been looking at pictures of gum surgery on the internet and the thought of it really scares me.

I would like to know if you feel that gum surgery after gum disease is necessary or is an alternative less traumatic treatment possible? If I have to have gum surgery, is it possible to have the treatment under IV sedation? I would like to be as deeply sedated as possible if I am to have gum surgery.

[Dr Mohsen J. Esfahani]

Hi

With Gum disease we usually try to treat it first with non-surgical deep gum treatment. Sometimes we repeat the non-surgical treatment several times but even after that there may be certain areas around some teeth that still have deep gum pockets that stagnate plaque.

In these situations, sometimes the best thing would be to try to reduce these deep gum pockets surgically and I think this is perhaps what your gum specialist is doing with the gum surgery. Gum specialists are in my experience very capable dentists who would only do gum surgery as a last resort when other non-surgical therapies have failed.

Gum surgery can be done under IV sedation and with IV sedation and good local anaesthetic you will not feel anything during the procedure.