Emergency Dentistry

Are you experiencing a dental emergency? Please, don’t hesitate! Contact us immediately at (713) 960-4090.

Your situation may be considered a dental emergency if you are experiencing one or more of the following:

• Extreme pain in the gums, jaw, tooth or teeth

• Lost crown or dental filling

• Cracked, fractured or broken tooth, or teeth

• Tooth knocked out of it’s socket

• Cut gums, lip or cheek

• Swollen and bleeding gums – potentially pus filled

Don’t Hesitate if You are Having a Dental Emergency

Call our office at (713) 960-4090. A phone call may allow us to help save your tooth or potentially prevent infection if you are bleeding.

Emergency dentistry is needed for a variety of reasons, but one of the most common is a tooth that’s been knocked out. A tooth can be knocked out from fighting, from rough play, or from sport. The person who’s lost their tooth should find it, wash it off and put it back into the socket. If the tooth can’t be put back into its socket it should be put in milk or clean ice water.

The patient must get to an emergency room within fifteen minutes. Any longer than that and the tooth might die. The patient will be given either local anesthesia, or if there’s time, general anesthesia. The root canal nerve of the tooth is removed and then filled with plastic material, then the tooth is replaced in its socket. The dentist or oral surgeon may use wire to secure the tooth to the teeth on either side of it.

In the first 24 hours after the surgery the patient shouldn’t eat, spit, or rinse. After a day they can rinse their mouth with warm salt water every one or two hours. They shouldn’t bite down on the tooth until it heals. The doctor will prescribe antibiotics, as well as pain killers that should be taken as needed.

The patient should expect to be completely healed in about a month, as long as the tooth is able to reconnect with the tissue in the mouth and be saved. If so, the tooth should look perfectly normal once the healing process is complete.

Another common need for emergency dentistry is tooth extraction. Occasionally a tooth is abscessed and can’t be saved, or a tooth forms impacted and can’t emerge properly because there’s no room for it in the jaw. During extraction, the patient is sedated and the tooth is extracted. Then, a gauze sponge is packed into the space. Sometimes the gum over an impacted tooth has to be cut open and the gum sutured shut after the tooth is removed. The postoperative care is the same as for a tooth re-implantation and the patient should see complete recovery in about three weeks.