Emergency responders don’t send out emergency dental services when there is a dental emergency, so we need to be resourceful when presented with an emergency dental situation. Knowing where to start when you’ve got an emergency is secondary to knowing whether your situation constitutes an emergency at all.
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We consider a dental emergency to be anything that is causing our patients severe pain or any injury to the teeth or tissues as a result of trauma. Often this occurs due to a sports injury or due to wintertime slips, trips and falls.
If you are at home when an emergency occurs, your best bet is to call your regular dentist to explain the situation and ask whether they can see you for an emergency appointment. If your dental clinic is closed, you may try other clinics nearby or find a walk-in dentist who can assist you until you can get back to your regular dentist for further care.
When you are away from home, do not delay seeing a dentist immediately because you are commuting back to your regular dentist. In some cases, like when a tooth has been knocked out, the time delay could mean the difference between keeping or losing the tooth. See a dentist near you as soon as possible with the help of search engines to help you locate a provider if needed.
Stay calm. Collect any tooth pieces that you can find and rinse them under clean water. Take steps to stop the source of bleeding using pressure from a gauze pad or clean piece of fabric.
Severe pain in a tooth should always be considered an emergency since dental infections can be dangerous if they spread and they can damage teeth roots and bone. To manage your pain until you see your dentist, you can try clove oil at the site and place an ice pack on the outside of the cheek to decrease the inflammation and calm the nerve.
Some dental problems are important but not urgent, so they don’t have to be seen the same day but should be attended to as soon as otherwise possible. Sometimes, your dentist may ask you to wait a day until they can see you to correct your concern. This happens when orthodontic brackets break away from the tooth, if a filling falls out or a crown has popped off.
Most non-emergency dental concerns can be managed with the help of a little dental wax from your local drugstore. If you don’t have dental wax, you can use a piece of sugar-free gum in place of it until you can locate the wax which will stay in place for longer. When a filling is lost or a crown pops off, what remains is exposed tooth without its protective enamel. When this happens, your tooth can feel sensitive and sometimes painful. In order to provide relief, press a ball of dental wax into the lost filling area and pack it into the tooth with a clean, wet cotton swab. Once you’ve removed the excess, the wax should protect your teeth, though it will require that you are gentle with it so that it doesn’t wear away too soon.
Before you place dental wax, always make sure that your tooth is clean. When reseating a crown on a tooth, place the ball of wax or gum into the cleaned crown and press it back onto the tooth firmly. Now, your crown will protect your natural tooth from irritation.
If your tooth is troubling you before you see the dentist, you can try placing a drop of clove oil onto the tooth that is hurting and the mild pain-killing effects should dull the ache and bring relief. Clove oil is a safe treatment that will not harm your teeth and it can be purchased at the drugstore along with dental wax. Orthodontic brackets can also be stabilized by pressing dental wax over them to protect the cheek and lip tissues from potential cuts and scrapes.
If you break or chip a tooth but the break does not go through the dental canal, this is usually not considered a dental emergency, but you should still be seen by your dentist soon. Bring any tooth fragments along with you to your appointment, since your dentist may use it to inform the tooth’s restoration if it cannot be re-bonded to the tooth.
For questions about this or other services offered by our general dentist, contact our clinic today.
