When do you need emergency dental care?
It may seem obvious if you’ve just chipped a tooth or even if you have broken an entire tooth that you have to rush off to see an emergency dental team, but emergencies can be more subtle than this. Even in cases of trauma, like a chipped tooth, you may have no discomfort and think that things are going to be fine. But it is often not such a good idea to just leave it.
When is it important to seek out emergency dental care? Let’s look at the top 5 reasons why you might need to see our emergency dentist Brentwood.
Tooth and gum discomfort
When you have this, you will know for certain that something is wrong. The most common reason why people see our emergency dentist Brentwood is that the discomfort has simply become unbearable. There are lots of reasons for this, the most common is a dental abscess but it could be due to a severe cavity which has reached the nerve or some other form of nerve exposure from erosion or trauma.
Either way, this can be deemed as an emergency if you are being robbed of sleep, the ability to eat and usually the capacity to concentrate on anything for more than a few moments.
Bleeding gums
Bleeding gums are very common and are usually a case of early gum disease or gingivitis, both of which can be treated fairly easily if they are caught early enough. The bleeding is usually fairly subtle and is mostly noticeable when brushing but, should the bleeding become more severe and be accompanied by tooth wobbling, come and see our dentist Brentwood urgently.
Knocked out tooth
Completely knocked out teeth are actually quite rare; usually the tooth is broken with the root remaining in the gum and only the top half of the tooth has been lost. If the tooth has not been recovered, crowning would be the normal treatment procedure. If you can attend the clinic with fragments of the tooth that have been knocked out, it may be possible to reconstruct your tooth using a mixture of dental ceramics and light cured resins. That said, you have to attend the clinic as soon as possible with as many tooth fragments as you can find.
Lost or displaced filling
No fillings are designed to last forever; even the most well carried out and well cared for fillings have an average 5-year lifespan. Although checking if your fillings are in need of repair is a normal part of a biannual check-up for people, it is entirely possible for a filling to work itself loose. Sometimes this goes unnoticed until decay sets in and the tooth nerve is affected. With deep cavities, the only thing that is stopping contact with the dental nerve is their filling and you will notice as soon as one is lost with a sharp distracting sensation in the tooth.
Should you suffer this, book an appointment with our team.
Avulsed teeth
Avulsed tooth loss is the complete loss of a tooth with the root cleanly from the jawbone. It is a slightly less common form of tooth loss due to trauma, but one that can be relatively easily treated as we can reimplant the tooth. This has to be done as quickly as possible and if you have experienced this type of tooth loss please get in contact with us. We will try to see you as soon as possible, as any delay in treatment will significantly reduce the chances of the tooth successfully being reimplanted.