When a grease fire starts in your kitchen, you call the fire department. When you fall from a ladder while cleaning out the gutters, you call an ambulance. And when you chip or break a tooth, you contact an emergency dentist in Craven County.
At Evolve Dentistry & Aesthetics, we can take care of your dental emergencies, whatever they may be. Our founder and dental expert, Dr. McGowen, can examine your teeth and make a recommendation for the procedure you need.
We can repair, extract, and replace teeth to restore a healthy smile after a dental emergency. Keep reading to learn more about the process and our resources.
What is considered a “dental emergency?”
Many different concerns might fall under the term “dental emergency.” At Evolve Dentistry & Aesthetics, we consider any condition that requires immediate attention to be a dental emergency. If you injure your jaw or break a tooth, you should meet with a dental expert immediately.
We can help you right away, so your concern doesn’t worsen over time. If you don’t know whether you’re experiencing a dental emergency, ask yourself if it can wait until your next check-up.
You can also call our clinic and talk to our experts. While we can’t diagnose your condition over the phone, we can offer a recommendation and help you decide whether it needs more immediate attention.
Types of Dental Emergencies
Dental emergencies come in many forms. Take a look at some of the concerns we can treat at our emergency dentist in Craven County.
Infected Teeth With Swelling
Your teeth are filled with a substance called pulp. When the enamel exterior wears down, the pulp in your tooth can become infected. This results in symptoms like swollen gums, pain and sensitivity, bad breath, a bad taste in the mouth, and more.
A tooth infection can also progress to the point where the pain gets unmanageable. If your tooth infection causes you severe pain, reach out to our emergency dentist.
Loose Crowns or Fillings
Fillings and crowns seal off damaged teeth, preventing infection and additional damage. However, these fillings and crowns deteriorate themselves. For instance, something as simple as chewing on a sticky piece of candy can cause your crown to come out.
You shouldn’t leave the inside of your tooth exposed, so if you lose a filling or crown, we can replace it to minimize your risk of infection.
Broken Teeth
Many people visit our emergency dentist in Craven County because they break or lose a tooth. This may occur for many reasons, like a slip on the ice or a missed pop fly, but regardless of the cause, you shouldn’t ignore broken teeth or exposed gums.
A chipped tooth can also expose nerves, potentially causing serious pain and irritation or leading to infection. Talk to a dentist if you’ve lost or damaged a tooth.
Facial Injuries
Even if a facial injury doesn’t immediately result in lost or broken teeth, it still might warrant a visit to the emergency dentist. A particularly severe facial injury can misalign your teeth or cause them to become loose. This can eventually create infection or severe pain. If your teeth have moved after a facial injury, come talk to our dental experts.
The First Step: Examining Your Teeth
No matter the reason you visit an emergency dentist in Craven County, we examine your condition for ourselves before recommending any treatment.
After you check in, we get you seated on one of our treatment chairs, we’ll take an x-ray to make sure your tooth is healthy and then take a closer look at your teeth to identify any chipped, broken, infected, or misaligned teeth.
Once we finish the exam, we can recommend a dental treatment to address your needs. And in the case of dental emergencies, we can start administering your treatment right away, depending on the situation. Some teeth may be too infected and painful at the time to do any work. If that is the case, we’ll prescribe a few days worth of antibiotics that will help lessen the infection and the pain you’re experiencing.
Our Emergency Dental Treatments
When you visit an emergency dentist in Craven County, your treatment may take many shapes. Depending on your needs, we can recommend care from a variety of options.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at the emergency dental treatments our founder, Victoria McGowen, DMD, can perform.
Crowns & Bridges
Crowns and bridges help patients with broken, fractured, or missing teeth.
Crowns are caps that fit over damaged teeth to prevent further damage and repair their appearance. Crowns also function as tooth replacements, allowing patients to eat normally.
Bridges help patients who have lost a tooth. Bridges consist of 2 or more crowns fused together. We place the ends as caps on the teeth on either side of the gap, and the “floating” crown in the middle replaces the lost tooth.
Like standard crowns, bridges look and function just like normal teeth. We can also customize your crown or bridge to match the tone of your existing teeth, so that the structure blends in with the rest of your smile seamlessly.
Root Canals
If you come to an emergency dentist because you’re experiencing extreme tooth pain, then you may have infected tooth pulp. In this case, we perform a root canal procedure.
During the root canal, we first numb your mouth, then Dr. McGowen drills a tiny hole in the tooth to access the infected pulp inside. With a series of specialized tools, she can remove any problematic pulp and then seal up the tooth. This will allow you to keep your natural tooth while removing the infected tissue that is causing pain.
Following your root canal procedure, we may also install a crown to better protect your tooth. We can schedule the appointment for this treatment before you leave our clinic.
Our team takes the patient experience into account to make the root canal recovery process as simple as possible. We provide personalized recovery instructions, including antibiotics and steroid prescriptions as needed. These medications help prevent additional infection and reduce swelling in the treatment area.
You may notice some soreness in the treatment area after the anesthesia wears off, but this should only last for a few days. You can mitigate this irritation with over-the-counter pain medication. Avoid eating with your treated tooth, but after your pain subsides, you can resume using your tooth as normal.
Tooth Extractions
When you come to our emergency dentist in Craven County, we work to save your teeth whenever possible.
But if your tooth is too damaged or infected, we may opt instead to perform a tooth extraction. During this process, we pull out the tooth and remove any remaining fragments from the socket. Then, we clean the gums to reduce the chance of any further infection.
The healing process may last 3 to 4 days. We can tell you about any symptoms you may notice during that window. For instance, in the first 24 hours following a tooth extraction, you may experience some drainage from the socket. This is normal and not a sign for concern. We provide all the information you need to rest and recover effectively.
Dental Implants
Whether you’ve lost a tooth because of an accident or we’ve extracted it due to untreatable decay, we may choose to replace your missing tooth with a dental implant.
During this process, we anchor a crown to a specialized foundation called an implant post. For this more intensive dental process, we work with trusted surgical partners, who can install the post into the jawbone.
Before installing your implant post, however, you may need a bone graft. The bone graft provides a perfect base for your implant post. During this process, we insert surrogate bone into the empty socket, filling it. This provides surgeons with the necessary surface area for the implant post installation.
After that heals, we secure a custom crown to the implant post for permanent results. As with a standard crown installation, we can create a custom mold of the affected tooth and send it to our partner lab to create a crown based on the mold. We can also color this crown to match your teeth, so the implant perfectly fits in with your smile.
Fine-Tuning Your Smile With Cosmetic Adjustments
If you want to adjust the appearance of your teeth after your treatment with our emergency dentist in Craven County, we may recommend Invisalign. Invisalign clear aligner trays can slowly and subtly shift the position of your teeth, without the need for obvious wired braces.
When you opt to receive Invisalign from our team, we start by scanning your teeth and using this data to design a series of clear trays. These trays gradually become straighter, so as you wear them, you can shift your teeth to a more desirable position.
You may need anywhere from 15 to 20 trays, and we schedule occasional maintenance treatments to monitor your progress. Anywhere from 6 to 18 months and you’ll enjoy a straighter, more uniform smile.
Prepare for Emergencies With Evolve Dentistry & Aesthetics
When a dental emergency arises, contact the experts. At Evolve Dentistry & Aesthetics, we have the emergency care you need to treat severely damaged or missing teeth. We can also perform a myriad of other aesthetic, restorative, and general dentistry services.
To find the right treatment for you, consider trying our free online planner. It pays to be prepared—talk with our team.
