Handling Your Child's Dental Emergency: Quick Tips for Parents
Dental emergencies can occur unexpectedly, causing significant pain and distress for both children and their parents. Unfortunately, dental pain can be particularly debilitating. Children will find eating, sleeping, speaking, or even playing difficult if their teeth or gums are hurting. This is why dental pain requires urgent care from an emergency dentist, especially when it involves children, who may not have built up as much tolerance for pain as adults.
When your children have a dental emergency, act promptly by seeing a dentist immediately, ensuring your child’s comfort and preventing further complications. From knocked-out teeth to severe toothaches, understand how to handle these emergencies promptly with the help of this guide.
What to Do in a Dental Emergency?
You probably consider anything that causes your child pain and anxiety as an emergency that needs urgent care and resolution. The following are typical paediatric dental emergencies and tips for dealing with them if they happen to your children.
Infected or Abscessed Tooth
If a tooth becomes infected, an abscess or a pocket of pus may form around it. This causes severe, throbbing pain that makes it difficult not only to chew but also to speak and lie down. The pain is so consuming that it can radiate from the abscessed tooth to the jawbone, neck or ears.
An abscessed tooth can also cause the face to swell. Other symptoms can include a fever, general malaise and a bad taste in the mouth.
What to Do
The first thing you should do if you see an abscessed tooth is to book an emergency dental appointment. You want abscesses to be treated as soon as possible because the pain can be unbearable for your little one. Additionally, any bacterial infection necessitates prompt medical attention and action to prevent its spread from the infected tooth to the surrounding gum tissue, the inside of the cheeks, the tissue around the jawbone, and the rest of your child's head and body.
While waiting for your dental appointment, apply an ice pack on the outside of the infected area to reduce the pain and inflammation. An abscessed upper tooth typically requires an ice pack on the cheek.
Icing must be done in 10- to 20-minute intervals. Do not apply ice directly on your child's skin. You can even wrap the ice pack in a soft, thin cloth for further protection.
Bleeding Gums
Your child's gums can bleed after some hard toothbrushing. If gum bleeding happens infrequently and for these reasons, it's usually not an emergency.
However, gums may bleed because of underlying gum disease. If the bleeding is accompanied by other symptoms, such as gum tenderness and redness, a receding gum line, and bad breath, it can be due to gingivitis (or some other gum disease).
What to Do
If your child's gums bleed randomly and intermittently, even when you're not brushing their teeth, you should get them looked at by a dentist. This is particularly important if you see symptoms other than gum bleeding. You must definitely seek emergency dental care if there is prolonged bleeding.
While waiting for your dental appointment, moisten a piece of clean gauze with cold water and wipe off the blood. Use a similarly cold wet gauze to slow or stop the bleeding.
Knocked Out or Chipped Tooth
Children are active and playful, and tumbles are natural occurrences. Unfortunately, they might fracture or lose a tooth or two when they fall.
Teeth fractures may seem simple, but they may lead to complications. For instance, a tooth may be broken into multiple pieces. Additionally, the break may not be visible. Finally, the break may expose the pulp, which can lead to a tooth infection.
A baby tooth knocked out of place can be a simpler matter. You can just let the loss be and wait for your child's permanent tooth to replace it.
What to Do
If your child loses or chips his teeth, check it carefully. For instance, if a baby tooth has been lost, inspect the socket to ensure the tooth is entirely out and gone.
If your child loses a baby tooth, you may have it checked by a dentist. This time, your goal is to ensure the remaining teeth are healthy and the replacement tooth can grow properly and will not be misaligned. You may also want to confirm that the tooth isn't simply broken or fractured.
A fractured tooth requires dental care. You must book an appointment with a dentist as soon as possible so they can check that:
* The fracture is clean
* The tooth is not broken in multiple pieces
* The tooth pulp is not exposed, and there's no risk of infection
Additionally, inspect your child's mouth right after the incident that caused the tooth to break to see if there are no stray pieces in their mouth. You don't want to risk your child swallowing tooth fragments. You should also try to collect all the pieces of teeth you can find to show your dentist.
If your child's mouth or gums are bleeding and swelling because of the injury, you can let them suck on an ice cube (only do this if your child is capable of sucking without swallowing). You may even give them an ice pop; your child will love that. Otherwise, you can use a cold, wet gauze.
For Paediatric Emergencies
Their children’s health is one of the most important things to parents. Parents want their children to be in the best health, and they go to great lengths to ensure this. They have regular wellness appointments with their general physician, and they may consult a nutritionist to ensure their children are eating right. They obtain eye care services for eye health maintenance and to treat refractive errors and other paediatric eye conditions, and they schedule regular teeth cleaning and dental checkups, too.
However, medical emergencies are unavoidable no matter how much you try to safeguard your children’s health and well-being. Paediatric dental emergencies are particularly common. Your child's teeth can become infected, abscessed, fractured, or knocked out, and their gums may also bleed.
When medical and dental emergencies occur, seek emergency care. Just make sure to help minimise your child’s pain and anxiety while waiting for your child's appointment with your doctor.