When Should You See an Emergency Dentist in Shelby Twp, MI?

Hi. This is Dr. Antolak from thegentledentist.com in Shelby Township, Michigan. I would like to discuss dental emergencies. So let’s say you are at a baseball game or a football game and one of your kids get hit in the mouth or you see somebody else gets hit and one of their teeth actually pops out.

I have a model here showing your front teeth and your back teeth. Most of the time if somebody gets hit its going to break a part of that tooth off. It’s an emergency, but there are different levels of emergencies.

So if they knock off a portion of the tooth, try to recover that tooth, and bring it with you to your visit because many times we can literally glue or bond on that segment of the tooth to the other natural tooth. It works very well and it’s actually very conservative. If there’s enough of that tooth available we can make it look pretty darn decent, and it’s a pretty simple process.

The next level of an emergency is if you chip off a tooth and it gets into the nerve of the tooth. In a case like that we’re going to need to probably remove the nerve out of that tooth and then restore that with possibly a crown or a cap or even a filling depending on the age of the child or the adult.

The worst type of dental emergency is what’s called an avulsion. There are a couple different types of avulsions. An avulsion is where the tooth actually starts to come out.

So let’s say this is the dental patient and the tooth is loose like this. You always want to do the best you can to actually insert the tooth right back into the socket. The longer you wait for that to take place, the worse it is because what will happen is you’ll start to clot up so time is of the essence.

If an accident like this takes place you want to try and get into a dentist within a half hour is the best time, or within an hour. But try to get the tooth into its socket, into the right orientation. Push it out and do what you have to do to keep that in its location.

If there’s dirt on it see if you can do something to possibly rinse that off. Don’t scrub the outside of the tooth because that has what’s called a periodontal ligament which is a like a fibrous, elastic layer that can reattach once that tooth is back into that socket.

So if it’s a partial avulsion like that try to get it back the mouth. If it falls out all the way, find it and rinse it off. If you have milk, dip it in milk and clean it off that way. This may sound gross but you can even have the child or adult try to lick off their tooth to keep it clean. Their own saliva is not going to be damaging to their tooth. Okay? So they can do that if they had to. Then once again, try to reorient that tooth back into where it goes.

If you have a question about its orientation, what you want to do is pay attention to which tooth it is. So let’s say it’s this tooth on this person’s, left-hand side. Go to the other side of the mouth. You want to look at symmetry, so you look at other side and just kind of match up what that tooth looks like, then you can go ahead and do your best you can to insert that tooth into the socket. Then get on your way to an emergency dentist.

When Should You See an Emergency Dentist in Shelby Twp, MI?

If this is your current situation, you have get out of here right now and get to the dentist. If you do need a dental home and you don’t have one, our number is 586-247-3500. If we’re not in the office, I do have my cellphone. That’s the emergency line, so it’ll be right on that number as you call it. So please, if you do have a dental emergency, just give us a call, and we’ll get you in right away if we can.

There are some ways to prevent dental emergencies. The best prevention is to use mouth guards. If you’re doing sport activities, I’d use a full coverage mouth guard which really helps to protect your mouth and your teeth. Thank you, and hopefully you’re not having an emergency, but if you are, get to the dentist right away.