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Emergency Dentistry in Centennial, CO
There are many situations where patients feel they need relatively quick access to the dental office. Fortunately, few are true emergencies; most will not worsen over a few days. If you feel that you are having a dental emergency, please call, and we can make arrangements to see you soon; we can likely schedule a same-day appointment. We might not have the time to complete your procedure, but we can provide the proper medications and smooth sharp edges.
If you are experiencing a significant amount of swelling or pain associated with a tooth or in the soft tissue of your mouth, you must seek treatment quickly. Often this indicates an active infection and will require antibiotic treatment and possibly draining of the infection. If you are not able to contact us, you should consider going to an urgent care facility.
There are several kinds of toothaches with varying degrees of seriousness.Potentially, the most painful is a tooth with deep decay that has become infected. Also, a tooth with a previous large filling or crown where the nerve may die and be infected. The pain can usually be isolated to one or two teeth and feels deep within the bone or root of the tooth. The pain is often triggered by cold and sometimes hot; often, the tooth will be uncomfortable to chew on or just ache on its own with no obvious cause.The good news is that this type of toothache usually gets worse and sometimes gets better for a few days or weeks before the pain returns. The bad news is that because it sometimes gets better, people keep putting it off (until Friday afternoon after the office is closed) and hope it will go away. If you have been having pain in a tooth for more than a few days, call! When you come in, we can make a diagnosis and begin to help things feel better.
Occasionally, an individual will be eating and then feel something surprisingly hard in their mouth. Invariably this occurs when they are eating the “softest food” they have ever consumed! The hard piece is often a piece of tooth, filling, or crown. It is not necessary to identify what it is but make an appointment so we can make a diagnosis and repair the tooth before things get worse.
This usually occurs when there is a previous large filling already in the tooth, and a portion of the tooth breaks off around the edges of the filling. Sometimes this also occurs because of deep decay inside the tooth and weakens the part of the tooth that broke off. Because of the size of the previous filling plus the size of the additional tooth that broke off, we must usually restore the tooth by placing a crown to hold the remaining tooth structure together.
We will tell you that we are truly amazed at the quality of the filling materials developed for dentistry in the past 20 years. Even though this is true, fillings occasionally break. In this case, depending on where the break occurred or the size of the filling, we can repair/replace the filling, or if the missing piece is too large, we will need to place a crown. We can show you with intra-oral pictures and x-rays which option is best.