How To Prepare For Dental Emergencies

An emergency can happen anywhere and anytime. Dental emergencies are no different but not many people seem to be as prepared for having a dental emergency than they are for regular medical emergencies. Many parents have first aid kits for everything that can happen to their children when they are away from home but they do not have a first aid dental kit prepared for them. Here are a few ways to be prepared for a dental emergency until they can visit their emergency dentists.

Have A Dental First Aid Kit Prepared

You most likely already have a regular first aid kit prepared for your family in case of a regular emergency but do you have a dental first aid kit prepared for a dental emergency? Here are a few things you should have in your dental first aid kit.

• Rubber gloves for keeping sanitary
• Alcohol wipes to clean dirt and blood from the area that is injured
• Gauze pads or at least cotton balls to prevent further injury and to stop the bleeding
• Hydrogen peroxide for disinfecting the wounds and cleaning up blood
• Salt for dissolving into warm water and to make a mouthwash to soothe the pain
• Floss to get in between the teeth for removing food particles that may be stuck. Doing this can help relieve the pain until you get to your emergency dentists office.
• Dental wax for covering and protecting sharpened and broken teeth and covering broken dental wires and brackets.
• Pain reliever like aspiring for relieving the pain until you can get them to their emergency dentists office.
• Topical pain reliever to help manage the pain caused by a dental emergency.
• Vaseline for the temporarily reattachment of a dental crown until you or your children can see a dentist.
• Temporary dental filling material for keeping your or your child’s tooth injured tooth protected until you see a dentist or your children get to see their pediatric dentist.

Reasons For Seeing Emergency Dentists

There are some minor dental emergencies you can use your dental emergency first aid kit until you or they see an emergency dentist. This can include things like biting the tongue with your tooth or biting your lip with your teeth. However, there are also those emergencies where a first aid kit might help for a few minutes but only until you get you or your children to an emergency dentist. Here are some of those emergencies.

1. When your baby has one of their baby teeth knocked out,you need to visit a dentist immediately. Don’t try to reattach it because you could cause some serious damage to their permanent teeth.
2. When one of your children’s permanent teeth are knocked out, first thing to do is to find it and rinse it off with cold water. Do not try to scrub it and don’t use soap. The next thing you can do is to put it back into the socket and hold it there in place with either gauze or a clean washcloth until you can make it to the pediatric dentist. However, if you don’t have any gauze pads or a washcloth, try to put the tooth in a cup of milk, saliva, or cold water until you get them to the childrens dentist.
3. If your child ends up with any damage to their teeth or chips in them, you will need to gather whatever fragments of teeth that you can and place them inside some milk or cold water until you can get them to a dentist. You will want to have your child rinse their mouth out with water and then, if their mouth is hurting or swelling at all, place a cold compress on it. Doing all of this until you can get them to their emergency dentists office is best for preventing infection and making things worse for them.

Prevention is always important but being prepared is too. Fact is, in 2015, about 43 % of children between two and 19 years of age ended up reporting suffering from cavities with 13 % of them left not treated. Also, in 2016, about 84.6 % of children between the ages of two and 17 years old were seen by a dentist.