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February 9th is National Toothache Day! This is a great opportunity to talk about toothaches and how our team can help you with a problem tooth (extraction) and set the stage for a tooth replacement using a dental implant. Your teeth are an integral part of your oral health and healthy teeth make healthy smiles. So how do toothaches impact your dental health?
Toothache Pain and Symptoms
Toothache pain is an early warning system that lets you know there is something wrong. Serious toothaches arise from dental conditions that typically won’t improve on their own. It often involves the tooth pulp, the soft inner filling of a tooth where the nerves, tissues and blood vessels reside. Your pulp nerves are so sensitive that when infected by a bacterial abscess, you will likely experience severe pain.
A toothache can feel sharp, throbbing and constant especially when biting down on something. You’ll have swelling around the tooth, possibly accompanied by headache or fever. If the infected tooth is actively draining, you’ll experience a very bad taste in your mouth. Your tooth will likely require intervention if the pain lingers longer than a day or two, if the pain level is high or accompanied by an earache. Toothaches need to be treated to keep the infection from spreading to other areas of your face, jaw, neck, sinuses and brain.
Surgical Tooth Removal
Our oral surgeons are skilled, experienced experts at removing teeth. We have extensive experience in a variety of surgical procedures, which we often perform daily. We are exceptionally qualified to help you by extracting the following problem teeth:
- Damaged or fractured teeth
- Infected teeth
- Severely decayed teeth
- Wisdom teeth
- Impacted teeth (stuck within gum tissue interrupting proper eruption)
Because these surgeries are commonly done at our practice, we make sure that your are made comfortable during your time in the chair. We provide you with effective sedation or general anesthesia to help you relax while we take care of your smile. We have more training and experience than any specialist other than physician anesthesiologists. Additionally, our surgical facilities come with modern operating rooms and state-of-the-art monitoring equipment. This also allows us to safely deliver your anesthesia. Even our surgical assistants are certified in oral surgery and anesthesia. We hope this inspires confidence for your smile in our professional team.
Treating Infections
Our oral surgeons are ready to get rid of the pain and swelling you might have in your face, neck or jaw from an infected tooth. Remember, a severe toothache should never be ignored as the infection can potentially develop into a life-threatening health emergency. Our team will quickly and thoroughly drain the infected area and removing the infection. We will also likely involve using antibiotics so the tooth be extracted safely. So for example, when you come to us for an emergency examination appointment, we can treat you with antibiotics right away before scheduling you for oral surgery once the swelling in the tooth has gone down.
Dental Implant Tooth Replacement
Our surgical team highly recommends replacing extracted teeth with dental implants. Implants are simply the standard of care and the preferred method of tooth replacement options today. Unlike any other tooth replacement option, dental implants uniquely keep bone resorption/deterioration from happening, which normally happens after losing a natural tooth. Dental implants are the only treatment option that preserves the surrounding teeth, because we don’t cut those teeth down to support a dental bridge or attach a partial denture onto them. Dental implants boast the best long-term success rates of any tooth replacement option, and the literature has been supporting this for more than forty years.
A well care for smile can help your dental implant last a lifetime, just as it would with well cared for natural teeth. By maintaining proper bone density and protecting those nearby teeth, your dental implant can beautifully restore your smile. With our experienced team, your smile has never been in better hands!