How to rinse a diseased tooth for speedy pain relief

Next you will learn:

• What should rinse a sick tooth to get rid of toothache as soon as possible;
• What is the mechanism for relieving pain when rinsing the mouth and how it is implemented in practice
• Important rules for effective rinsing, which will allow you to get a positive effect and at the same time not harm your health;
• And also what kind of solutions and decoctions can and cannot be used to rinse your mouth with toothache.

Often toothache appears at the most inopportune time - for example, during the holidays or on a trip, when immediately contacting a dentist for help can be very problematic. And, perhaps, the first thing a person does in such a situation is trying to rinse a sick tooth in the hope of getting rid of unpleasant sensations as soon as possible (the second common approach is taking pills for toothache, although often both options are actively combined).

First of all, it is worth noting that mouth rinses in some cases are really able to significantly relieve toothache, if you approach the procedure correctly. However, as practice shows, when a person suffers from severe toothache, far from the most harmless rinses are often used - they rinse your mouth literally with anything: alcohol, vodka, hydrogen peroxide, a strong solution of potassium permanganate and even gasoline. Needless to say, without understanding the principles of pain relief by rinsing a diseased tooth, a person has every chance of doing himself more harm than getting benefits.

Therefore, let’s figure out how to properly rinse your mouth to relieve toothache, to really reduce its intensity and not harm yourself.

It is interesting

The first mention of the benefits of rinsing the mouth occurs in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine in almost 3000 BC. Hippocrates later wrote about using a mixture of vinegar, alum and salt to treat gums.

Today, a large number of special mouthwashes are produced, including those used to treat stomatitis, oral ulcers, gingivitis, and also prescribed after some dental interventions.

To begin with, it should be borne in mind that teeth can be sore for various reasons, and in simple terms, the most common causes are as follows:

• Caries destroyed a part of the tooth, and now the nerve endings present in the dentin react to various stimuli that enter the carious cavity (the remains of acidic, sweet, spicy foods, etc.);
• Or the bacteria got to the pulp chamber of the tooth and caused inflammation of the so-called dental "nerve" - ​​the pulp. Here, in the confined space of the pulp chamber, the neurovascular bundle swells, is squeezed by a serous or purulent exudate, which provokes severe pain when a person literally finds no place for himself. In the future, pulpitis can develop into periodontitis - at this stage the cheek may already be with a good third of the face, often the temperature rises;
• Teeth can also ache (whining) due to thinning or damage to the enamel - for example, after a room whitening procedure, or due to the prolonged use of whitening toothpaste, after eating acidic foods, etc.

Sometimes a person may think that his teeth hurt, but in fact the problem is in the gums.

Feedback:

“Recently I also suffered, in the evening my teeth started to ache badly, I thought it was caries. Every time they ached all evening. But it turned out that the problem was not in them, but in the gums. The doctor prescribed drops for my gums, I bred them and rinsed them for a week, immediately it became better ... "

Oksana, St. Petersburg

 

Mouthwash Relief Mechanism

From the foregoing, it becomes clear how exactly mouthwashes can alleviate the condition of a diseased tooth:

1. If you rinse your mouth, this will help to wash away irritating food residues and putrefactive bacteria from the cavity, which often eliminates toothache in the shortest possible time (provided that the reason was precisely in these very annoying residues). By the way, rinsing your mouth, it is useful to simply plug a deep cavity into the cavity for a while with a piece of cotton wool, so that when eating, the remnants of food do not get into it again and cause severe pain.
2. With pulpitis and periodontitis, when the inflammatory process takes place, rinsing the diseased tooth can also alleviate pain, although usually the effect occurs rather slowly and is not always very pronounced. In this case, rinsing your mouth will be useful to increase blood flow to the site of inflammation and, as a result, accelerate the removal of toxins and tissue breakdown products from it. If the carious cavity in the diseased tooth communicates with the pulp chamber, then such rinses will further contribute to the outflow of pus from it.

As previously noted, “toothache” can be caused by gum disease rather than tooth decay due to tooth decay. That is, a person may think that his tooth hurts, but in reality there is gum inflammation, for example, due to the accumulation of food debris in the so-called gum pocket (at the place the gum adjoins the tooth).

Bacteria actively multiplying here in the course of their life can not only lead to gum inflammation, but also damage hard tooth tissues - for example, cause tooth root caries, although the crown part will seem absolutely healthy.

In all such cases, mouthwashes also have a very positive effect, helping to remove food debris and bacteria from the gum pockets.

Feedback

“... A good medicine for rinsing your mouth is Listerin, it helps me a lot with toothache. Such a special solution, it is still prescribed by dentists to those whose tooth enamel is weak. When a tooth hurts, I do this: after eating, I brush my teeth, then rinse my mouth first with plain water, and then Listerin. And that's all, after this gum solution nibbles a little and the toothache calms down. ”

Ivan, Volgograd

However, still much more often toothache is a consequence of caries or pulpitis - here we will talk more about these cases in more detail. Moreover, in order to achieve a positive effect, it is important not only to know what is the best way to rinse a diseased tooth, but also how to do it correctly so that the effect is maximum.

 

Rules for effective rinsing

Eliminating toothache by rinsing the mouth, one should take into account a number of important rules, the observance of which will allow you to get the desired effect and at the same time not harm your health.

These simple rules are:

1. Do not rinse your mouth with too hot a solution. The optimum temperature is 37-45 ° C, but not higher. Fans of rinsing a sick tooth with hot broths can not only burn their mucous membranes of their mouths, but also burn the pulp inside a completely living tooth, which will subsequently lead to its necrosis.
2. The more rinses occur, the better. Ideally, a diseased tooth and gums should be washed regularly with a fresh solution. In practice, in most cases, it is enough to rinse your mouth once an hour or two for about 15-20 minutes per procedure.
3. You can not warm a sick tooth outside - for example, a heating pad, or snuggling up to a stove or heating battery (there were such cases). From this cheek can swell very much. Also, one should not sleep on the side of the face where the diseased tooth is located.

It is these recommendations that dentists usually give to their patients, who ask for advice over the phone to endure the treatment itself (well, unless they can additionally recommend painkillers for toothache).Moreover, the more painful the tooth is and the more pronounced the inflammation, the usually more determined the patient is at all costs and to get rid of his problem as soon as possible - it’s important in this case not to go to extremes and not to forget about common sense (not to warm the solution to rinse to a boil in the hope that the hotter it is and the more painful it is to rinse it, the more useful it is: do not soar the swollen cheek in the bathhouse, expelling “hated ailment” with a broom; etc.).

On a note

Sometimes you can hear that to remove pus from purulent pockets, “hot” mouth rinses are recommended - so, this does not mean that you need to pour boiling water into your mouth. We are talking about solutions and decoctions having a temperature of about 45 ° C. In any case, the rinse should not burn or cause severe pain: if you have pulpitis and a solution with a temperature of 45 ° C causes a sharp increase in pain, then you do not need to torment yourself - rinse the affected tooth with a solution with a temperature of 36-37 degrees.

In most cases, the most effective rinsing of a diseased tooth looks like this:

1. A warm rinse is collected in the container - about a liter or a half;
2. An empty bowl is prepared if the rinse is not carried out above the sink;
3. About half a full swallow of the solution is collected in the mouth, and the mouth cavity is thoroughly rinsed for 20-30 seconds. Moreover, it is necessary to do this so that it is the diseased tooth that is irrigated with the solution especially intensively.
4. After rinsing, the solution spits into a bowl, then a new portion is recruited, and the process repeats. And so on until the exhaustion of the entire prepared solution, which should take about 15-20 minutes. After a couple of hours, the whole procedure can be repeated.

Important!

But if you have a tooth removed and the gum hurts (after the action of anesthesia has passed), then you must approach the mouth rinse very carefully. It is important here not to damage the protective blood clot that has formed in the tooth hole and reliably protects it from infection. Many maxillofacial surgeons generally do not recommend rinsing their mouths on the first day after tooth extraction. On the second and subsequent days, active rinses are also not acceptable, but neat oral baths are quite suitable - they scored a solution in their mouths, held them at a sore spot and spat.

 

How to rinse: we select the most effective solution

It may seem strange, but the composition of the solution for rinsing a diseased tooth is, by and large, secondary - much more important is how the procedure is carried out. If the procedure is carried out correctly, then the maximum effect can be achieved with simple warm water.

However, individual additives can increase the effectiveness of measures taken:

1. Salt or soda - they are added in the amount of one teaspoon per glass of water (you can limit yourself to just salt). Such a hypertonic solution provides the removal of pus from the site of inflammation, and an increased temperature of the solution promotes blood flow to the affected area.
2. Chamomile with anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects. They simply make a decoction from it, pour two tablespoons of dried flowers in a liter of boiling water, allow the solution to cool to the desired temperature, filter it and then rinse.
3. Sage, whose properties are quite similar to those of chamomile. We can say that rinsing the mouth with a sage broth is a classic, and many dentists often recommend this option. Rinses with sage are carried out in the same way as rinsing with a decoction of chamomile, and the decoction is prepared according to the same recipe, with the only difference being that instead of chamomile, sage leaves are taken.
4. It is also worth mentioning oak bark, known for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties.

In cases where all these funds are unavailable, rinse your mouth with plain warm water or even tea (no sugar). It is only important that the liquid is not cold.

Than it is NOT recommended to rinse your mouth with toothache:

• Hydrogen peroxide - so shortly earn a chemical burn of the mucous membranes of the mouth; in addition, if the cavity is in communication with the pulp chamber, then a solution of hydrogen peroxide can flow into this chamber and begin to decompose in it with the release of oxygen bubbles. A sharp increase in pressure in the pulp chamber can cause a significant increase in pain;
• With a strong solution of potassium permanganate - it can also cause burns (if you already want to rinse with potassium permanganate - you should use a 0.1% slightly pink solution);
• Gasoline and kerosene - no effect (other than a health hazard) such rinses will not give;
• Alcohol - yes, it is a good antiseptic, but at the same time it burns soft tissues. With prolonged contact with a tooth with a deep carious cavity, ethanol can diffuse into the pulp chamber and lead to pulp necrosis.

Feedback

“Rinsing with salt personally often saved me from toothache, I don’t even have to drink pills. When I feel that I am aching, I pour a third of a tablespoon of table salt into a glass of hot water, mix, rinse my mouth and everything passes. It is clear that this only works if you take care of your teeth. So my sister brought the whole thing to inflammation, then walked with a cheek to the shoulder ... "

Veronika, Orenburg

 

When rinsing does not help with toothache

It is important to understand that mouth rinses do not allow you to cure a bad tooth: enamel corroded by caries will not grow from this, and a half-dead pulp will not come to life. Such rinses will relieve pain only for a short time, so at the first opportunity you need to see a dentist.

In some cases, rinsing helps weakly or does not help at all - a lot depends on the physiological characteristics of the person and the specific pathology that led to the appearance of toothache.

Sometimes rinsing your mouth can even harm, especially if you do not rush to get an appointment with a doctor. For example, with difficult teething, a severe inflammation of the gum tissue surrounding it can occur, and warm, and even not always properly performed mouth rinses can, in rare cases, only aggravate the inflammatory process.

Be that as it may, trying to rinse off a toothache just so as not to go to the doctor can be very dangerous. So use this technique wisely and only as a temporary saving measure.

If you have already managed to relieve toothache by rinsing your mouth, be sure to leave your review at the bottom of this page: how did you rinse it, did it help and if so, how fast? ..

 

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