What Should You Do With a Broken Tooth?

The teeth can endure chewing and even grinding of hard foods. It is in fact, the hardest among all the tissues in the body. However, several reasons may cause the hardest tissue in the body to break. Trauma or injury is the most common cause of this. Other causes would include tooth decay, infection, and demineralization.

What do you need to do when a tooth breaks? Broken teeth are relatively painless unless the dental nerve roots are affected. And since we mentioned that trauma is the leading cause for breaking teeth, all other injuries related to the trauma have to be evaluated and managed as well. Having attended to those things, this discussion will now focus on managing the broken tooth.

A broken tooth may have a wide range of severity and an equivalent range of management. On the least spectrum of severity, the tooth may simply have small chipped enamel.  The chipped enamel can easily be managed with filling. On the worst spectrum of severity, the tooth could be avulsed from the socket. This situation would warrant emergency treatment with splinting. Most broken teeth are intermediate in severity for which crowns are appropriate management. These broken teeth usually lose enough surfaces to enable proper biting or chewing. They may even expose the underlying nerve roots. Crowns are a form of tooth restoration. They are prostheses that are set on top of the tooth to replace or protect the tooth surfaces. Crowns are fashioned to appear as natural as teeth and to be durable enough to perform in chewing. The other management options for broken teeth include the placement of dental veneers to improve the appearance and restore the integrity of the broken tooth. Root canal treatment can be done for compromised nerve roots. Tooth extraction with replacement with prostheses is a later option. All these management options are available in Delray Beach.

A broken tooth needs to be attended to immediately. It may appear unsightly. This would be even more bothersome if it is located in the anterior teeth segment. Teeth are set in place to allow even distribution of pressures when biting or chewing. The loss of teeth surfaces can disrupt this balance for Delray Beach area patients. This disruption can lead to further damage to the tooth or other surrounding tissues. The exposed portions of the tooth can become infected as well as the adjacent structures. Not attending to the broken tooth immediately can cause the eventual loss of the tooth and cause other problems in the oral cavity.