Toothache

Toothache has many different causes, affects people in different ways and there is a wide spectrum in the severity of the tooth pain. It can take over your life or act as a minor irritation or annoyance.

Characteristics of Toothache

Different characteristics of toothache can be increased sensitivity to hot and cold, increased pain on chewing or biting or a constant or intermittent throbbing or aching. It can be worse at particular times of day or after eating or when food gets trapped between the teeth. It can be localised to a particular tooth, to a particular area or not all.

Toothache can be caused by receding gums, dental decay, cracked tooth, an abscess caused by infection associated with the tooth or gums, inflammation of the gum around the wisdom tooth, food trapping and countless other causes.

When you make an initial booking at Ethicare Dental, we can carry out a detailed dental examination where we check everything going on in your mouth and provide you with a costed treatment plan. Alternatively, if needed, we see you for a dental emergency where we will diagnose the problem and do what we can to alleviate your dental pain. The key to carrying out appropriate treatment to deal with toothache is taking the time to get the initial diagnosis correct.

What we hear a lot from patients is ‘it wasn’t hurting so I didn’t bother with a visit to the dentist’. Dental decay can advance almost to the nerve deep inside the tooth before it starts to cause pain. If left too late a root treatment might be the only option, when an earlier visit to the dentist may mean that this treatment could be avoided and preventive work or simple fillings carried out instead.