Trauma to the face or teeth can result from accidents, falls, and injury from sports such as football, hockey, soccer, volleyball, basketball, and baseball, etc. Patients suffering significant head, neck or facial trauma should be evaluated and treated in hospital emergency rooms. Such trauma may involve bleeding from the nose or ears, concussion, dizziness, lapse of memory, disorientation, severe headache and earache, or fracture of the skull and/or jaws. Most hospitals have on their staff oral surgeons who can treat fractures of the upper or lower jaw and perform emergency tooth removal and reconstruction of the dental arches.
Dental trauma can be caused by an injury, an accident, or a fall.
Sometimes only a small chip will come off the edge of your tooth. Other times the tooth will crack or break off close to your gums. You may not have pain if you lost a small chip from your tooth. You may feel pain if your tooth cracks down to the soft tissue inside. Your gum will bleed if the tooth comes out.
Soft tissue injuries may require only cold compresses to reduce swelling. Bleeding may be controlled with direct pressure applied with clean gauze. Deep lacerations and punctures may require stitches. Pain may be managed with aspirin or acetaminophen (Tylenol, Aspirin Free Excedrin) or ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil). The treatments are Different in Different conditions. This vary depending on the severity of the fracture Sometimes stitches are required although with a lot of lip injuries, the lip has to be left to heal naturally. Painkillers can help with the pain. Broken teeth require the mouth to be rinsed out in order to clean the area. The sooner a dentist is visited, the greater the chance of saving the tooth. Dentists often advise people to hold on to the tooth or any broken bit after dental trauma, keeping them moist is essential. When the entire tooth has been knocked out, it is important to hold it by the crown rather than the root. After such a trauma, the dentist will try to save all of the teeth, although this is not always possible and sometimes an artificial crown or tooth is needed. A broken jaw must be set back into its proper position and stabilized with wires while it heals. Healing may take six weeks or longer, depending on the patient's age and the severity of the fracture. If a piece of the outer tooth has chipped off, but the inner core (pulp) is undisturbed, the dentist may simply smooth the rough edges or replace the missing section with a small composite filling.
