“My tooth hurts!”
Ouch, my tooth hurts! Few things are worse than when you have a nagging tooth pain. Trying to find relief is tough but are all tooth pains the same? No, Let’s discuss it!
Imagine you are just sitting around watching TV, just relaxing and you start to feel this achy discomfort that comes out of nowhere. The discomfort feels like a “throbbing pain” that may come and go in waves. You decide that you may want a warm drink and that causes the tooth more discomfort. These are all signs that the nerve inside the tooth are going bad. The “achy, throbbing” discomfort you feel is the nerve abscessing, or dying, causing an infection. What does that mean? The tooth will need a root canal to remove the nerve. Everyone has horror stories of how awful root canals are but they are pretty boring with no discomfort during the procedure and minimal discomfort after.
Next type is usually after you have some dental work done and after an amount of time, you start to notice discomfort and your teeth do not fit quite right. The tooth can become sensitive to cold and hot liquids. Typically all that needs to be done is the filling or crown needs to be adjusted. It may take a couple days for the tooth to completely settle back down.
Along the same lines, you may be eating some food, typically something hard, and you get an electrical jolt from your tooth with some discomfort that could linger after. This is a sign that the tooth is trying to split. If the tooth is splitting it can go two ways: 1) Only the part above the gums is breaking off. The treatment is to crown the tooth to help make it structurally sound. 2) The crack has progressed down the root of the tooth. Once it has progressed far enough down, the tooth is no longer viable and will need to be removed.
These are just a few examples of the main things we see. There are varying degrees of these three scenarios and many more nuisance reasons why a tooth can have discomfort. I will wrap this up by saying that getting dental work done is usually much easier if the tooth is treated before it starts hurting. Getting regular check ups allows us to intervene when issues are small.
