Can Your Dentist Help with Loose Teeth?

A loose tooth is just one step away from falling out of its socket, and no-one wants a gappy smile right? But beyond that, loose teeth are problematic beyond just cosmetic reasons.

Unlike a loose baby tooth, a loose adult tooth can lead to complicated issues such as deterioration of the tissue in the jawbone, changes to facial structures, and misalignment of existing teeth. Regardless of whether the tooth is causing you pain, you ought to seek treatment immediately because the longer this is left untreated, the more likely the tooth is to fall out and cause the deeper dental issues mentioned above. Treating a loose tooth is a lot more straightforward than having to replace a tooth with an implant!

Why can teeth become loose?

• Trauma to the tooth: an acute blow to the mouth (e.g through sport) may loosen the tooth from its socket, but even long-term issues such as stress and teeth grinding can cause trauma to the tooth over time
• Gum disease: tissues inside the mouth can become infected, damaging the gum and the bone structures keeping teeth in place
• Tooth decay: Similar to gum disease, decay can damage the tooth’s structures. This is often caused by poor dental hygiene.

How can we treat it?

• Splints: We often attach a splint to the surrounding teeth in order to stabilize the loose tooth and allow it to re-bond with the surrounding bone structures
• Root scaling and planing: this is a deep cleaning treatment where we remove tartar and plaque from the teeth, the roots and the gum pockets prior to applying the splint
• Medicinal mouth rinses: we may need to prescribe you this to manage gum disease and enable the structures around a loose tooth to repair themselves
• Surgery: where there is severe damage to the gum, we may recommend surgery to rebuild damaged bone structures
• Soft tissue/bone graft: this is used in more complex cases where a tooth has been loosened due to damaged gum or bone structures. Here we use transplanted bone to repair and rebuild the diseased tooth.

What to do next

Do you have a tooth that’s feeling a bit wobbly? You can seek emergency treatment with us even if you’re not a regular patient at Lancaster Family Smiles. Don’t postpone treatment and allow your symptoms to become deep-rooted (see what we did there!). 

We can help with an array of emergency treatments from chipped teeth, replacing fillings, to full wisdom teeth extraction. To learn more on how treatments work, check out our blog which answers all of your dying dental questions, from explaining the pros and cons of professional teeth whitening, to explaining how the wisdom teeth extraction process works.

Contact our DeSoto area dentistry service for all emergency treatments.