Larc400 wrote:1) When you say yours were impacted, does this mean they were below the gum line, or sticking up a bit, but at an odd angle?
I don't know the full extent of my wisdom teeth impactions because I never examined them closely, and don't have a copy of my dental x-ray handy to look at (though now that I think about it, it'd be good to get a copy from my dentist so I could be more descriptive for people).
I know all four were impacted to some degree (and by "impacted" I mean either unerupted below the gum line or partially erupted--I don't believe any were angled too far from the vertical). I also recall the second ENT I saw remarking that my wisdom teeth sat sky high in my oral cavity, very close to my maxillary sinuses. My dentist also told me for certain that my lower right one was "exposed", that is, partially erupted. When I asked him how effectively one could clean these kinds of teeth with brushing and flossing, his one word answer was: "impossible!". That sealed the deal for me as far as getting them out.
And after getting them out, as I had stated in my original post, the cheesy/foot odor that used to be in my nose regularly returned with a vengeance, and a truly gagworthy pungency that bore little resemblance with the nastiness of the old one by comparison. Based on where I could sense it coming from, I do believe it retrospect that it was that exposed wisdom tooth that was the main culprit (though the others may have certainly played a role, and I could have been off).
2) Did you ever have any infection in the wisdom teeth area, as a result of the bacterial collections there..?
To the best of my knowlege, and perhaps surprisingly, no. Pericoronitis is supposedly a nasty infection that causes noticeable swelling and pain. I never had such symptoms, though the odor was obviously always there. Why didn't develop into a full-blown infection? I don't know. Perhaps I did have a minor, chronic infection that never manifested any of the major symptoms.
I guess maybe the wisdoms are not the problem for me: all 4 are grown out properly. There are tiny flaps etc but nothing major. Still, I'm interested to learn more...
Yes, and I should emphasize to members here that wisdom teeth are probably only possibly the culprit of your bad breath if they're impacted. If they're fully erupted and in normal anatomical position, getting them out probably won't improve your breath. But my gray-haired oral surgeon who had 35 years of experience with wisdom teeth didn't believe my breath would improve with extracting them--even being impacted--either--but he was dead wrong!
This is why I won't discourage people to give extracting them a try, even if they're fully erupted and normally positioned.
It's interesting that your tongue never had an odour though. Maybe that's what differentiate your case from many others. Mine always stink, only rarely is it below a 2 out of 5 score for stench. More common is a score of 3-4...
I never said my tongue never had an odor, only that I always failed to detect it with any scratch-and-sniff or lick-and-sniff crude type of test. For a good while I actually believed the second breath odor I suffered from (which as I stated previously I can only describe as a musty, stinky water, wet wood-like odor that was very like the smell of the mist one produces with a deep, hard sneeze) originated from the back of my tongue.
The way I would always seem to detect both the cheesy and sneezy odors best was by tilting my head back and hitting it repeatedly against the back of my neck (it seems funny, I know, but that's what worked!). I would sometimes do this after brushing my teeth as one of my various experimentations in trying to identify the source of my problem. The sneezy odor would only be faintly detectable at the point, if at all, but I could produce it by doing one round of tongue scraping and then doing the tilt test again. After a second and further rounds of tongue scraping it would elude me again.
Naturally, I thought the brushing and first round of scraping were stirring up the odor-causing bacteria on the back of my tongue (hence causing release of the odor), and the successive rounds were getting rid of that bacteria. So I got to doing tongue scraping say 3-4 times a week, but both odors continued to plague me and nothing ever changed.
That was until God hit me in the head with the metaphoric brick that made me think to get my wisdom teeth out and I had them out (certainly it wasn't going to come from any dentist or ENT).
After getting them out, I could detect immediate improvement as I said, but I still occasionally got around to doing my routine of brushing, tilt test, scraping, tilt test, scraping etc. Up until about two weeks ago I could still produce that sneezy odor with that routine every now and then. But now that the upper left socket has almost completely closed up with new gum tissue (I can barely even feel an indentation there anymore) the sneezy odor has completely disappeared and I can no longer produce it at all, no matter how hard I brush, floss or scrape.
Did my tongue have anything to do with it when it was around? Apparently not, since it vanished but my tongue remains the same as ever, right? Now that will make you wonder, then, why I could seemingly stir up the odor by scraping my tongue? The answer is: I haven't the foggiest idea! Logic dictates there must have been some connection, but I simply can't fathom all that was going on there on a microscopic level with microbes transferring around the mouth and whatnot.
But on second thought, brushing does leave a film on the tongue, not matter how hard we gargle afterwards. Was my brushing transferring bacteria from the gum around my wisdom tooth to the back of my tongue, which I was then stirring up with scraping? It could be...but that would only show how difficult it is to pinpoint the exact source of bad brath, even if one believes he or she is certain.
The moral is that I too, at one point, blamed my tongue (among many other things) for what ailed my wisdom teeth.
Hope this helps...