What is considered dental trauma?

Doctor's Answers 1

Dental trauma is a very big topic and it covers quite a lot of things. The trauma that you can sustain to your teeth can be very simple or it can be very complicated.

For example, you could have a small chip on your front tooth, that’s considered a traumatic injury to your tooth. It can be just a small little chip and might not even cause pain, but it can still be considered to be trauma. On the other spectrum, you could have trauma to your teeth as a result of a very serious accident, for example, road traffic accident. You could be involved in a vehicle accident where you’re not just having trauma to your teeth, you are also having trauma to your jaw, your face. Your teeth get really badly smashed. That’s very severe trauma. And then you’ve got trauma that’s kind of in-between, where the injury is not so severe but it’s still causing you pain, you still need to get it fixed.

So it’s really a big topic. How it affects you really depends on how extensive the trauma is and the damage that has been sustained.

Similar Questions

Is it possible to have sustained dental trauma without knowing it?

Yes, you could have dental trauma without even knowing it. A very common minor traumatic injury to the tooth that I often see happens when you are eating. For example, if you’re eating and you are biting down on something really hard. For example, using your teeth to bite on chilli crab shells, or if you use your teeth to open beer bottles. People use their teeth to do a lot of silly things. So when you do that, sometimes you injure the tooth by using too much force on it and then you can have a chipped tooth or you can have a small crack on the tooth.

Photo of Dr Gerald Tan

Answered By

Dr Gerald Tan

Dentist

Is tooth extraction one of the ways to deal with dental traumas?

Yes. If the tooth splits right down. If the tooth is cracked right down the middle, and if it splits and shatters into small bits and pieces, then there’s no hope in saving the tooth. Then it’s down to extraction and replacing the tooth with a denture, dental implant or a dental bridge.

Photo of Dr Gerald Tan

Answered By

Dr Gerald Tan

Dentist

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