What Are the Causes of a Dental Emergency?
The best way to maintain excellent oral health is to stay on top of emergency dental eventualities by seeking urgent care immediately.
What is a Dental Emergency?
It is an urgent and severe dental problem that needs prompt treatment. Dental emergencies require immediate care in emergency dental care centers for the following reasons:
- To disallow the worsening of the condition
- To treat pain levels as opposed to managing or suppressing the pain
- To save natural teeth – a dentist at Prime Dental of Liberty Hill can help save your tooth if you visit our dental facilities soon.
- To protect the healthy tissues – other parts of your oral cavity need protection from the infection causing the dental emergency.
What is Considered a Dental Emergency?
A dental emergency should be any dental problem that is severe and urgent enough to disrupt your daily life routines. Some indicators that you are suffering from a dental emergency are:
- Excruciating pain may keep recurring or escalating with time.
- Significant swelling gets worse with time, so the swelling may even spread to other parts of your face and upper body.
- Prolonged bleeding – the mouth has a natural mechanism to stop bleeding. Therefore, you should be alarmed if you have been noticing blood in your mouth for prolonged periods.
- Fractures and broken parts – whether your tooth or jawbone.
- Open wounds
- Even though you can, the inability to move your mouth well is pretty painful when experienced.
Based on those factors, dental experts and emergency dentists near you have come up with a comprehensive list of common dental emergencies, including the following:
- An abscessed tooth features an infected tooth so that the tooth’s root builds up with pus and other infected fluids and soft tissues. The swelling causes significant pain in your gums and jawbone, especially when chewing.
- Knocked-out tooth – sometimes the tooth may be partially dislodged so that it remains somewhat attached to your jawbone.
- Dental caries is an infection of the tooth that begins due to demineralization of the enamel. Early in the caries process, you may not need emergency dentistry. However, you need urgent care to save your natural tooth if bacterial infection advances.
- A tooth fracture is a broken tooth. When the tooth breaks significantly, it can damage the nerves thereof. An emergency dentist near you would need to perform radiography to determine how much damage your tooth has incurred internally due to the fracture.
- Tooth avulsion is a missing tooth, mainly due to dental accidents. The dentist can reinstate a knocked-out tooth in your mouth if you find it and preserve it properly before getting to an emergency dental clinic. However, it is not always the case, which means that your dentist may recommend restorative dental solutions like dental implants, dentures, or dental bridges.
What is the Number One Cause of Dental Emergencies?
Dental emergencies frequently occur, with the number one cause being dental trauma.
Accidents and injuries happen randomly, so it is almost impossible to predict when and how you experience dental trauma. Some people are at a higher risk of dental accidents than others. Besides, accidents can take various forms and affect your mouth differently. They include:
- Foreign objects stuck between teeth are common among people who try to poke sharpies in between their teeth.
- Fractured jawbones are common after injuries, including car accidents and falls.
- Knocked-out teeth are prevalent among athletes who fail to protect their teeth with mouthguards before engaging in high contact sports.
Aside from those, other typical causes of dental emergencies are:
- Pericoronitis is a swelling of the gum tissues at the site of an erupting tooth. For instance, when a wisdom tooth erupts, your gums will swell and be slightly uncomfortable. If the tooth erupts improperly, you will have an impacted tooth that may need emergency dentistry in Liberty Hill, TX.
- Dental allergies are typical when consuming foods.