It is a common belief that if you aren’t feeling any pain or discomfort, there must be nothing wrong. Unfortunately, this is not always true. There are many conditions that can occur in the body, which give you little or no indications they are there. For example, people who have heart disease or high blood pressure can feel nothing at all; and we all know what will happen if these problems go unchecked!

The mouth is no different. It is often possible to have dental decay, gum disease or even more severe dental infections in the mouth that go completely unnoticed because there is no pain.

For example:

• With dental decay, there are usually no symptoms at all until the decay gets very close to the nerve of the tooth. All of a sudden, when the decay touches the nerve, there is pain that is so severe that people cannot sleep at night time.
• With gum disease, there are usually no symptoms at all as the jaw bone slowly dissolves away. All of a sudden, when the last bit of jaw bone holding the tooth finally dissolves away, teeth become extremely loose and painful, and can even drop out of the mouth altogether.

It sounds bleak, but fortunately, often diagnosing and managing the condition in the early stages can very easily stop these infections from progressing.

Here is an example of real life of a patient who had quite a severe dental infection and was completely unaware of it. Have a look at this X-ray, which has all the important structures labelled:

If you look underneath the tooth, there is a dark circle under the root of the tooth. This dark circle is hole in the jaw bone. Yes, this patient had an ongoing infection for so long that the infection has actually caused a physical hole in the bone!

After this was diagnosed, the infection was cleaned out, and fortunately the bone was able to heal and grow back again:

If you are interested having a consultation and assessment for dental infections, feel free to call eDentistry Wantirna on (03) 9800 1184 or send us an e-mail at info@edentistry.net.au and have a chat with us.