In pain today?Emergency dental care in Cocoa Village

A knocked-out permanent tooth. Hold it by the crown rather than the root, rinse gently with milk or water if it is dirty, and try to place it back in the socket. If that is not possible, keep it in milk and get to us quickly. The first hour matters more than anything else you can do.

Swelling. A cold compress against the outside of the cheek, ten minutes at a time.

Pain. Over-the-counter painkillers taken as directed. Do not hold aspirin against the gum, because it burns the tissue.

A crown that has come off. Keep it and bring it with you, since it can often be re-cemented.

A root canal has a worse reputation than it deserves. When the nerve inside a tooth becomes infected, the pain is often severe, and the treatment is what stops it. Under local anesthetic the infected tissue is removed, the inside of the tooth is cleaned and sealed, and the tooth is usually crowned afterwards to protect it.

The part worth knowing is that the procedure is not the painful part. The infection is. Most people find the appointment itself comparable to having a filling, and the aim is always to get you out of pain as quickly as we safely can. The alternative to a root canal is usually losing the tooth, which is a bigger and more expensive problem to solve.

Removing a tooth is the last option rather than the first, and we will look hard at whether it can be saved before we suggest it. Sometimes it cannot, because of a fracture below the gum, severe decay or advanced gum disease, and in those cases removing it is what stops the problem from spreading.

Extractions are done under local anesthetic and are generally more straightforward than people expect. We will talk about replacing the tooth at the same time rather than months later, because planning for the gap before it exists gives you better options than waiting does.

You will be told what emergency treatment costs before it begins. Nobody in pain should also be worrying about an unknown bill, and being unclear about money at exactly the moment somebody is most vulnerable is precisely the kind of thing this practice exists not to do.