Buzz
After a visit to the dentist to have a tooth pulled, you may find yourself wondering—as the numbness starts to fade—what actually happens to the extracted tooth?
Although some dentists inform their patients that it’s against the rules for them to take their extracted teeth home as keepsakes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), American Dental Association, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines suggest otherwise. These organizations allow for dentists to return the extracted teeth to patients, provided they request it. The only stipulation is that the dental office must properly disinfect the teeth before handing them back.
If patients decide not to take their extracted teeth with them, the teeth may end up in several different places. When dentists choose to dispose of them, the teeth must be discarded in specially designated medical waste containers. Since extracted teeth may still have small amounts of blood, saliva, or tissue remnants, they are classified as potentially infectious materials. Dental offices hire medical waste management companies to collect and incinerate these along with other biomedical waste.
If the teeth contain amalgam fillings, dentists must send them to a certified recycling center that handles metals. Since these teeth are considered hazardous waste, they cannot be incinerated because the heat could release mercury into the air. (Mercury poisoning from inhaling mercury vapor is something you definitely want to avoid.) Metal recycling centers extract the mercury from the amalgam, and that mercury can then be used in products such as laboratory thermometers, thermostats, and fluorescent light bulbs.
In addition to being discarded or recycled, extracted teeth can serve as educational tools for future dentists. Dentists may donate extracted teeth to dental schools or bring them along to continuing education courses to practice various techniques. Moreover, dental research organizations use extracted teeth to develop new treatment methods and improve the ways dentists care for teeth.
Dentists can even make money from the teeth they extract by selling them to scrap metal dealers. After extracting the gold from dental crowns, scrap metal companies send the dentist a small payment for a portion of the gold's value. But as periodontist Lonnie S. Rattner told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, "Believe me, no dentist is paying his country club dues with the amount of gold he's saving over a year."
