At Arizona Smile Designers, our mission is to help you achieve a smile you feel great about. We’re proud to offer a wide range of general and cosmetic dental treatments throughout the Sedona and Cottonwood, AZ areas, but beyond providing in-office treatment, we strive to be a dental health resource for all of our patients. One of the most unsettling dental health issues one can encounter is a chipped or broken tooth – but while chipping a tooth can be disturbing, it’s not the end of the world. Here’s how you should handle a chipped tooth.
The most important thing for a chipped tooth is to act quickly. As soon as you notice that your tooth is chipped, call our office at 928.634.8610 to schedule a repair appointment. We’ll provide further instructions over the phone, but if it’s outside our office hours, there are a number of other steps you can take.
The first step is to protect your tooth and mouth. If the chip produced a jagged edge, try covering it with a piece of dental wax or sugar-free chewing gum to keep it from cutting your cheeks or your tongue. Try to eat only soft foods until you visit to dentist to ensure you don’t make the breakage worse. If you find your tooth causing you pain, you can use an over-the-counter painkiller like acetaminophen or a salt water rinse to manage it.
Minor chips usually don’t require extensive treatment to fix, although larger breakages can be more intensive to repair. If the break is severe or you lose the tooth entirely, try to find the missing tooth and keep it in a cup of milk or water, then bring it with you to our office for an appointment.
Chipping a tooth can be an unsettling experience, but by handling the situation properly, you can prevent further damage to the tooth and help make for a smooth, simple repair. If you have more questions on how to handle a chipped tooth or your dental health in general, we’d love to hear from you – feel free to reach out to us at our contact page. We hope you found this information helpful, but we hope even more that you never have to deal with having a chipped tooth!
