Dental Emergency in London Waterloo

Dental emergency are generally quite traumatic – they can include injuries ranging from a broken or chipped tooth due to an accident to a severe tooth pain or ache due to an underlying infection. Under these circumstances, it is important that you visit an emergency dentist as quickly as you can, even though you may have experienced only a minor tooth chip or the toothache or pain may not be very severe. An appointment with an emergency dentist becomes a lot more urgent if you have knocked out a tooth due to a dental injury or trauma. The quicker you are able to visit an emergency dentist, the higher are your chances to have your tooth re-inserted successfully. The overall success of the treatment is of course dependent on the severity of your injury; however, it’s also dependent on how quickly you can get to an emergency dentist from the time of the actual injury.
We have listed below the three most common reasons why patients come to us for dental injuries. We advise the following to everyone –

• Broken or chipped tooth – A broken or chipped tooth often results in sharp/ rough edges to form on the tooth. The injury or trauma that led to the broken or chipped tooth might also have resulted in underlying damage to other tissue in your mouth, such as your teeth roots, gums and supporting tissue. Under circumstances like these, it’s key to see an emergency dentist sooner rather than later. The emergency dentist should be able to repair the broken or chipped tooth and smoothen its rough edges. The dentist will be able to use a tooth coloured composite resin material to rebuild the broken part of the tooth, thus restoring it to its original natural look. The white filling material used by the dentist can be made to exactly match the colour of your remaining tooth, no one will be able to even tell that your tooth was ever broken. The emergency dentist can also fix a broken molar with the help of a dental crown. The dental crown is like a tooth shaped cap that fits on an existing tooth to restore its function and form.

• Knocked out tooth –you may have knocked-out a tooth due to a dental injury or trauma. If this is the case, it’s really important that you visit an emergency dentist as soon as you possibly can. Advances in dental technology allow dentists to restore or re-insert a tooth that’s been knocked out into its socket, as long as you are able to visit the emergency dentist in under 45 minutes of experiencing the dental injury. The quicker you can visit an emergency dentist, the better the chances that the emergency dentist will be able to restore / re-insert your original tooth into its socket. It’s also vitally important that you handle the knocked-out tooth in a manner that maximises the chances of a successful re-insertion. To enable this, handle the knocked-out tooth very delicately, not doing any damage to it in the process. Never handle the knocked-out tooth from its root end and only touch it from the crown end. Store the tooth in a glass of cold milk or even water. Under some limite dinstances, you might be able to insert the tooth back into its tooth socket by very gently biting down on a soft towel. Do this for 15 to 20 minutes if at all possible.Reinserting the tooth into its socket may not be for everyone given the trauma and pain you may be experiencing. We therefore advise everyone to visit an emergency dentist regardless as soon as you can to help save the tooth.

• Tooth pain or ache – If you are experiencing a mild or severe toothache,this may be due to an underlying tooth decay or infection that’s reached the nerve of the tooth, potentially causing a swelling or an abscess. Often patients consume over-the-counter medication such as pain killers (e.g. Ibuprofen) to reduce the main. It is however important that you also address the underlying cause of the toothache to ensure the pain doesn’t come back again at a future date.