The Boy With 232 Teeth


Ashik Gavai was a seventeen-year-old Indian boy in a lot of pain. The right side of his jaw was swelling up like a balloon, and the local doctor didn’t know what to do. Worried the culprit was cancer, his parents took the boy to a team of specialists in Mumbai. Once they started poking around inside his mouth the doctors made an incredible discovery.

Ashik was suffering from a complex composite odontoma. A benign tumor was growing on the teenager’s jaw and essentially turned Ashik’s gums into a tooth factory. Over a seven hour operation, doctors removed 232 “pearl-like” teeth from the boy’s mouth. The four surgeons even discovered a “marble-like” brick and were forced to use a hammer and chisel to break it apart.