Dr. Katie To compares post-extraction healing to skin graft recovery after a burn. Treat the surgical site gently: eat soft foods, skip straws, keep it clean, and maintain good oral hygiene. The extraction site needs protection and patience before you can go back to normal.
Soft foods. After an extraction, I tell people to eat soft foods, avoid drinking from a straw. Of course, this is a surgical area. You're not trying to just eat foods and mess around with it. I do tell patients all the time, whenever you— this is comparative to a burn victim. Whenever a patient has a burn on their arm and then you get a skin graft from somewhere else on the body and then you transfer it, do you go out and you go play baseball with it? No, you lay there still until the graft takes and then you let it heal. You keep it clean. Right, you eat healthy to make sure there's no inflammation, there's no infection, no bacteria. Pretty common sense, you know what I'm making sure to keep this area clean.
