A crack, followed by a sharp pain – these are the usual signs of a broken tooth, often arising from one of these situations:
- Munching on nuts
- Eating your favourite hard foods or sweets
- Falling or being hit
- Old and worn-out dental fillings that don’t protect your tooth enamel
Can a broken tooth be saved?
Good news: in the majority of cases, the answer is “yes!”
Our Armadale dentists offer a range of emergency dental procedures for situations just like this.
We can provide immediate help when your teeth start hurting.
In fact, we can even preserve or completely restore your damaged teeth!
Dental procedures our Armadale dentist uses to fix broken teeth
The last thing you should do when your tooth is damaged is to let it be.
In many cases, this can lead to a further bacterial infection, and may even result in you losing the tooth in question.
Not to mention, it’s painful!
Our Armadale dentist has a range of procedures we can perform to reduce the appearance and function of your teeth, all the while reducing your felt pain.
These include…
Dental fillings
One of the most common ways that a tooth can be broken is through tooth decay.
Once the hard enamel layer decays, the sensitive insides are vulnerable to infection – not to mention, it hurts a lot too!
Dental fillings are intended to protect against this by restoring the missing part caused by decay.
This restores your tooth to its former shape and size and reduces pain by protecting the sensitive inside of your tooth.
Not to mention, we can also dramatically reduce your risk of further damage, toothache or even infection.
Our Armadale dentist starts by assessing the broken tooth visually and/or with an X-ray.
Following our assessment, we’ll come up with the right dental solution to your unique dental condition.
We’ll then prepare the broken tooth for tooth restoration. Depending on the condition of the tooth, various materials are chosen that best solve the issue and problem.
Learn more about dental fillings.
Veneers
Do you have a heavily filled front and discolored tooth? Or discolored antibiotic stained teeth? Veneers might be the solution.
Enjoy teeth that look healthy and whole again using veneers. Like the name suggests, veneers are thin white shells made up of resin or porcelain-like material that covers the surface of the affected tooth.
This is perfect in cases of intrinsic stains that can’t be removed either through brushing or tooth whitening.
What’s more, this also makes them useful for fixing tooth damage that’s limited to one side of your teeth.
If the cracks or staines only affect the front of your tooth, veneers are a suitable solution.
Dental crowns AND/OR Biomimetic Porcelain Inlays/Onlays
Another dental procedure we often end up using to save broken teeth is using dental crown.
Similar to fillings, crowns are used to cover up cracks, decay and other damage, protecting a weakened tooth and thereby eliminating tooth loss.
Unlike fillings and veneers however, dental crowns cover the entire affected tooth, top, back and front. They are like a “shock helmet” for a weakened tooth.
This makes them an idea solution for cases involving:
- severely chipped or heavily filled teeth
- Severe wear-and-tear
- Weakened root filled teeth
- “Cracked Tooth Syndrome”, where internal cracks have caused continual pressure pain.
Worried about appearances? Don’t be – the vast majority of crowns nowadays are usually made up of all ceramic or porcelain, which are more translucent (when needed) and more opaque (when needed).
They cover an entire tooth and blend in seamlessly with your existing teeth.
Further, all porcelain crown will not develop “dark-neck”, which is a downside of the old Porcelain Fused to Metal (PFM) crowns, which sometimes developed in the years after placement.
Biomimetic dentistry
An innovative new form of restoration that combines aesthetics and durability is to create a porcelain Inlay or Onlay that restores your tooth without removing more tooth than is necessary.
This technique can restore the large cavity by creating a custom “filling” like shape in a Laboratory via scanning or impressions. This high tensile strength restoration is bonded into position.
This is a very conservative method, leaving the most amount of sound tooth that is possible for a particular situation.
This type of dentistry is called Biomimetic Dentistry – “Copying Nature”, in other words. No wonder it’s such a popular option!
Root canal therapy
Not all tooth damage involves chipping and breaks – in some cases, tooth damage may be as simple as a very large cavity, that may lead to infection..
We mentioned above that deep tooth decay is often followed by infection. This can result in unsightly dark colours and or weakness forming inside your teeth, as well as intense pain.
This is the result of the nerves and pulp inside your teeth becoming infected and eventually dying. The dead tissue leaves an ugly dark colour, while bacteria may reach the nerves and blood vessels, causing pain, weakness and sensitivity.
Root canal treatments offer a solution. Essentially, it involves removing all the infected tissue from the inside of your teeth, before capping it with a filling and then a crown or onlay.
Depending on the nature of the damage, our Armadale dentists may prescribe root canal treatments to restore your teeth.
Dental implants
So you’ve knocked out a tooth altogether, and it cannot be restored.
Or further, the large cavity has completely destroyed your tooth.
Or you may be congenitally missing your tooth, or someone has already extracted your tooth many years ago.
For many, this is the point where they throw their hands up in the air and give up.
Thankfully, our dentist in Armadale has a solution – dental implants.
Like the name suggests, dental implants involve replacing lost teeth with realistic-looking replacements.
Unlike dentures, these implants are permanent, bonding to your jawbone and creating a tooth that’s just as strong as the real thing.
Dealing with a broken tooth or toothache
So you’ve broken your tooth, or you have a toothache. The first thing you should do is to book an appointment with an emergency dentist, ASAP!
Before your emergency appointment however, there are a couple of things you should also be doing to minimise additional damage, deal with any sharp edges or relieve the toothache (although this may be difficult or impossible) :
- Chew on the other side of the mouth, and avoid very hard food
- Sharp edges can be covered by sugarless gum (although this may help only for a limited time).
- Over the counter pain meds can help. Advil is an over the counter pain medication that is quite gentle (without opioids) and sometimes effective. Up to 3 tablets taken every 4-6 hours over a 24 hour period may be a good temporary solution.
- Sleeping with an extra pillow (that raises your head) slows the blood flow to the head, with the possibility of toothache relief.
- Experiment with sipping cold water and cold compresses. Sometimes extreme cold can give up to fifteen minutes of relief, and the combination of Advil and Cold in some instances can be a temporary solution until your emergency appointment.
- Hot Water sipping or heat compresses are often the WRONG thing to do.
While they won’t fix your broken tooth or a toothache, they can certainly make things more bearable while you’re waiting for your Armadale dentist!
Emergency dentist for a broken tooth? Call our Armadale dentist today!
A broken tooth is a dental emergency – one that requires immediate attention from a dental professional.
If you’re suffering from immense pain and discomfort arising from a broken tooth, the best thing to do is to call an Armadale dentist.
Best of all, when you call us before midday on a business day, we guarantee we’ll see you before close-of-business!
Call us anytime on (03) 9509 1500. Alternatively, you can book your appointment online using our handy booking portal.
