Visiting an emergency dentist is the best option for dealing with any dental-related health emergencies. While physicians in hospital emergency rooms are skilled in providing pain relief, they cannot restore a broken tooth or stop bleeding from a severed gum.
To ease the pain and swelling, rinse your mouth with cold or warm water and take over-the-counter pain relievers.
Tooth Trauma
Dental trauma, or traumatic tooth injury, occurs when the hard enamel layer, dentine and/or pulp are damaged. This type of injury is usually painful and needs to be seen by an emergency dentist as soon as possible.
Dental injuries can range in severity, with minor fractures being the most common. These can be treated by your emergency dentist in Bakersfield CA. In more serious cases, the root can be fractured or knocked out. In this case, the tooth must be repositioned and splinted in place to ensure it heals properly.
It’s important to prevent dental trauma by wearing mouth guards during contact sports, avoiding fighting and avoiding hard foods like bones and stale bread. If an accident does occur, it’s best to visit your local hospital emergency room for a full examination and treatment before visiting an emergency dentist in Bakersfield CA. This will make sure you don’t have any other injuries that require immediate attention.
Lost Fillings
Losing a filling is a common dental emergency. Dental fillings aren’t meant to last a lifetime and most will come loose or fall out at some point. This is why regular teeth cleanings and checkups are so important.
While losing a tooth filling isn’t necessarily an emergency, it does leave your tooth exposed to more decay and can cause pain. If you experience unmanageable pain, a foul taste or smell, or have drainage from the tooth, contact an emergency dentist right away.
While you wait for your appointment, rinse your mouth with warm salt water to remove any bacteria or food particles that may be lodged in the hole where your filling once was. You can use over-the-counter dental cement or cotton balls to cover the hole until you can get to your dentist. It’s also a good idea to take over-the-counter pain relievers and apply a cold compress to reduce your discomfort. This will help alleviate the pressure and reduce swelling until you can see your emergency dentist.
Broken Teeth
A broken tooth, or traumatic tooth injury, is a dental emergency that requires immediate treatment. Even a small break can lead to nerve damage when bacteria enters the soft pulp inside the tooth. It’s important to rinse your child’s mouth, place a cold compress on the area and offer pain relief (such as Children’s Tylenol) until they can be seen by their dentist.
Serious breaks that expose the tooth’s nerve can cause intense pain and will bleed, but they can sometimes be saved with root canal treatment. If the tooth is knocked out, it has the best chance of being saved if it’s returned to its socket within an hour. Rinse the tooth in saline solution, water with salt or a store-bought product that promotes reattachment like Save-A-Tooth. Apply gentle pressure with gauze or a damp tea bag to control bleeding and reduce swelling until they can see their dentist. If the tooth is a permanent one, it will need to be crowned or repaired.
Infections
Bacterial infections can be contagious, such as whooping cough, tetanus, and strep throat. You can also get them by breathing in bacteria-containing droplets (when someone coughs or sneezes), getting contaminated water into your lungs, or through oral, anal, and vaginal sex. Some bacterial infections can be prevented by getting vaccines and practicing respiratory etiquette (coughing into a flexed arm, not sharing saliva) or by wearing protective clothing in contaminated areas.
Some infections aren’t serious and can go away on their own, but others can spread quickly and cause a life-threatening condition called sepsis. Signs of this include fever, sweating, weakness, and a high or low blood pressure reading.
Treatment for a bacterial infection usually involves taking antibiotics, which can be taken orally (by pill, liquid, or capsule), injected (into a muscle), instilled into a wound, or given in a vein (IV). You might also take pain relievers and other medicines to ease your symptoms. If your infection doesn’t go away, you may need a different type of antibiotic or may need to be hospitalized.
