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There are many reasons that a patient might seek to buy amoxicillin for a dental infection. This is particularly true for conditions like an abscess, as it can prevent the infection from getting worse and potentially progressing to life-threatening sepsis while the chance to get an appointment is awaited.
However, an abscess is not the only nasty oral infection that amoxicillin can help to tackle. Another is dental cellulitis, which often occurs as a result of the infection in an abscess spreading.
What Is Dental Cellulitis?
Cellulitis is a bacterial condition that can lead to inflammation of facial tissues, with severe swelling. It can lead to potentially deadly conditions such as necrotising fasciitis (the so-called ‘flesh-eating bug’) and cavernous sinus thrombosis (A kind of blood clot that could lead to a heart attack). It can also progress to sepsis.
The causes of cellulitis are the streptococcus and staphylococcus bacteria. These are present in the skin and mouth, with forms of cellulitis potentially occurring in infected wounds all over the body.
Facial cellulitis tends to affect the external part of the face, whereas dental cellulitis will initially cause swelling and redness in the soft tissue around a tooth, before spreading to the wider facial area.
Abscesses are a common cause of this and are a consequence of not treating infections soon enough, which is another reason to obtain amoxicillin, especially if you cannot get to the dentist swiftly for treatment.
How Can Amoxicillin Fight Dental Cellulitis?
If you get this kind of infection, various symptoms will soon start to manifest. Redness and swelling caused by inflammation and the associated pain are the most obvious, with the spreading of these symptoms to other parts of the face producing external redness and swelling. As mentioned above, further complications can bring deadly symptoms.
It is clear, therefore, that urgent action is needed when things start to get this bad. Ideally, if you have a dental abscess, you will have already sought antibiotics like amoxicillin, which can prevent dental cellulitis from developing to begin with. However, if this condition does emerge, you will certainly need them.
Antibiotics are taken for around five days to bring the infection under control. This will ensure the infection does not reach the point of producing potentially life-changing or even life-threatening complications. Not doing this can be catastrophic, but by responding to an urgent situation, you can soon gain relief from the symptoms and avoid dire consequences.
The way amoxicillin works against streptococcus and staphylococcus is the same way it operates against other bacteria. Classed as a beta-lactam antibiotic and derived from penicillin, it works by binding to receptors in the bacterial cell wall and preventing the bacteria from synthesising.
Bacteria have to synthesise their cell walls to maintain themselves and multiply, so when this process is disrupted, cell lysis (the breaking down of cell membranes) takes place, which leads to cell death as the cells disintegrate.
With the bacteria cells dying this way, the infection will recede, which in turn means the symptoms will ease and further complications will be prevented.
Why Should You Take Amoxicillin For Any Dental Abscess?
The saying ‘prevention is better than cure’ is relevant in this case, but not quite in the usual manner. This may be a secondary infection arising from an abscess and in that sense, the initial infection has not been prevented.
However, the infection can be stopped from getting worse. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why, if you think you may have an abscess, it makes sense to get it assessed quickly. This and other additional infections and their associated symptoms can all be avoided by taking medication to kill the bacteria.
Since dental cellulitis can bring further complications that can eat your flesh or give you a fatal heart attack, while sepsis is another secondary infection that can arise, there is no good reason to ignore a tooth abscess, quite apart from the initial pain and discomfort it can cause.
As ever, like all dental problems, the situation is commonly made worse by the lack of NHS dentists and the general difficulty of getting an appointment, meaning people have to wait for longer and endure a lot of pain in many cases.
Amoxicillin won’t completely cure the problem, which means you will still need some treatment eventually, but it does hold back the worst consequences of infection, which, as this article and others have explained, can be very severe indeed. This will buy you time while you find an available dentist.
For that reason, it always makes sense to get help as soon as you know you have an abscess. Amoxicillin can help fight dental cellulitis, but if you start taking your antibiotics before this starts to manifest, it can also be prevented from arising in the first place.
