17yo goes to hospital for jaw pain, dentist takes out a chisel to remove 232 teeth

An adult human being has 32 teeth, including wisdom teeth. 16 on the upper jaw, 16 on the lower. So, how did a 17-year-old boy wind up with a colossal 232 teeth being removed from his jaw – roughly the same amount as some species of shark?

Well, don’t worry, the doctors were as confused as you are. The boy in question was Ashik Gavai, who turned up at a doctor’s office in 2014, in Mumbai, India, with a swelling in his lower jaw. The perplexed physician couldn’t figure out the cause and referred him to the city’s JJ hospital.

The cause of the pain was narrowed down to his teeth, and doctors summoned their head of dentistry, Sunanda Dhivare-Palwankar. He probably anticipated a normal day of extractions, fillings, and caps, but was met with a medical mystery unlike little else in his experience.

Dhivare-Palwankar eventually diagnosed Gavai with “complex odontoma“, a benign tumor linked to tooth development. He booked him in for surgery, but even that went far beyond what he expected. As he said:

“We operated on Monday and it took us almost seven hours. We thought it may be a simple surgery but once we opened it there were multiple pearl-like teeth inside the jaw bone.”

Get me a chisel, stat!

Ashik Gavai of Buldhana, Maharashtra, was verified to have the most teeth in a person on July 21, 2014.

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After painstakingly removing countless “pearl-like” teeth, the surgeons were confronted by another perplexing situation, a large “marble-like” structure that couldn’t simply be removed. And so they begin forcefully chiseling out the solid chunk, taking it out in fragments.

Dhivare-Palwankar believed at the time that 232 teeth would be a new “world record” for the number of teeth in a person. He may have been right, but in 2019, another Indian boy had a colossal 526 teeth removed from his jaw. I’m sure he was overjoyed to be the new record-holder.

Thankfully, Gavai’s story has a happy ending. The surgical team was careful to maintain his jawbone structure during the operation, ensuring that the site healed without deformities. His family had been terrified that the swelling was a malignant tumor, so the news that it wasn’t just benign but had been successfully treated must have been a relief.

All we can hope is that, 11 years on from making medical history, Gavai is living a normal life with a normal amount of teeth in his head. On top of that, we hope the tooth fairy paid out big time for this bonanza crop – money he desperately deserves for going through this!