Your chances for gingivitis and inflammation will increase the longer the bacteria hangs out on your teeth and gums. You don’t want your tooth pulp inflamed, causing intense and distracting pain that emanates all across your mouth with only temporary relief from brushing and gargling.
You certainly don’t want bacteria to eat away at your gums either, which will eventually lead to tooth loss. You can also suffer from the gum disease known as tooth loss, which causes bleeding of the gums, swelling, and redness.
The Proper Methods of Gum Care
Here’s how you can go about avoiding gum disease through proper care of your gums. After all, gum disease is best prevented by regular home-based and professional-backed dental care.
- Floss: Flossing is all about food remnant removal from in between your teeth before they rot or become food for your acid-producing mouth bacteria. It involves putting a dental thread between the gaps of every tooth to remove particles efficiently. You shouldn’t let these bits get stuck in those gaps because they’ll wreak havoc to your dental health down the line.
- Brush Gums: You shouldn’t only brush teeth; you should also brush your gums for good measure. Do it in a gentle manner so that you don’t irritate them and make them swell. Use a soft circular motion to avoid drawing blood. Gum brushing assists in removal of barely noticeable foreign debris.
- Gargle Mouthwash: You can either get a commercial mouthwash or a medicinal one like hexetidine depending on the severity of your gum diseases. Mouthwash is perfect for prevention of halitosis, mouth sores, oral thrush, and the like. Meanwhile, hexetidine is for symptomatic treatment of strep throat, Vincent’s angina, ulcerative stomatitis, laryngitis, tonsillitis, and gingivitis.
- See Your Dentist: Your dentist is your gum and tooth doctor. See him regularly (every six months or so) in order to get your teeth cleaned and examined. He can also make checkups on your gums and prescribe the proper medication in case they’re inflamed or in throbbing pain (usually antibiotics). He also knows how to detect early on (and minimize the damage of) gum disease.
Medication Side Effects
While hexetidine and antibiotics can relieve your gum swelling and pain, other drugs work in the opposite way and can cause gum inflammation. Such medicine includes calcium channel blockets, phenobarbital, and dilantin. They list sore gums as one of their side effects. If you’re having pain and swelling of gums without bleeding, then it might be because of your new medications.
Also remember that irritated gums shouldn’t require constant attention, especially when it’s being treated at the source. In fact, paying too much heed to your painful gums can worsen the symptoms because you’re constantly in contact with it instead of leaving them alone in order for them to heal on their own.
Treat the Source
Gum pain should be treated from the source. If it’s swelling from excessive flossing, then let it heal and take anti-inflammatory medicine. If it’s instead because of an inflamed tooth pulp or sore tooth nerve reaching all the way to the gums, then it’s time to treat the tooth (either by extraction or a root canal procedure).
If you’re taking medicine that has sore gum as a side effect, then either bear with the pain until the other condition you’re trying to treat is dealt with or get another prescription. You can also depend on those gum care methods in order to keep your gums healthy, strong, and not susceptible to bleeding, soreness, and wounds.
Thantakit International Dental Center is Thailand’s longest established dental center. Situated in Bangkok, our clinic is renowned across the world as a destination for world-class dentistry, with most of our patients flying to us from Australia.
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