What Are The Signs That You May Have A Dental Abscess?

The pain and swelling of a dental abscess can be very severe and the situation is made worse for many people by the difficulty involved in getting a dental appointment, either on the NHS or privately. It may be quite a wait before you get the chance to have the issue treated.

Although antibiotics are not an alternative to getting treatment for a dental abscess, if you can acquire amoxicillin antibiotics online, you can go a long way towards relieving the suffering and preventing the potentially dangerous further spread of the infection, which in worst-case scenarios can lead to life-threatening sepsis.

For these reasons, you cannot ignore a dental abscess or hope it will go away. The pain alone will not allow this. But how do you know you have an abscess in the first place?

This is not an abstract question. There are many reasons you may have a toothache. For instance, if you are in your 20s and the pain is around the molars towards the back of your mouth, it could be that your wisdom teeth are coming through. You may have damage or decay to a tooth that does not include an abscess or gum disease.

Most Abscesses Are Invisible

All of these can be very painful and require dental treatment, but an abscess is usually, by definition, invisible. There are three kinds of abscess, and only the first, gingival (which affects the gums rather than the tooth), might be visible.

In the cases of other kinds of abscess, a periapical abscess forms right at the tip of the root of a tooth, while a periodontal abscess forms in the bones and tissues around the tooth. Both of these will ultimately require time in the dentist’s chair, but all need antibiotic treatment if you can’t get an urgent appointment.

The key issue is to deduce by observation and experience what the symptoms are and then, if you think these indicate an abscess, to seek help. Ideally, this would mean a prompt dental appointment, but, sadly, those can be very hard to get. But by contacting us, we can assess you to see if you have indeed got an abscess and can benefit from amoxicillin.

Common Signs Of An Abscess

Pain and redness of the gums are two obvious symptoms, but not the only ones to look for. The first one, unpleasant though it sounds, is bad breath. You may need an honest partner or family member to tell you this. At the same time, you may have a bitter taste in the mouth as well, plus extra sensitivity to hot and cold food and drink.

You may even get a nasty taste in your mouth along with some fluid, which means your abscess has ruptured. Sadly, although this may ease the pressure on the gums, it does not clear the infection away, so you may still need treatment and antibiotics.

While the abscess is in your gums or at the root of your tooth and pus levels are building up, the pressure of this will cause not just pain, but swelling and your gums will become very puffed up. In addition, your infected tooth can start to feel loose.

Severe Symptoms And The Sepsis Threat

After this, symptoms can worsen. The throbbing pain you may feel centred on the affected area can spread into the jaw and up the whole side of your face. Your lymph nodes can be swollen. You may start to feel feverish.

When things start to get this bad, you definitely need to act, even if you haven’t until now. As symptoms get worse, so may the damage. In the case of gingival abscesses, for example, the infection can spread into other parts of the gums, causing more damage before spreading to the rest of the body.

A spreading infection is the last thing you want and, as mentioned above, it can ultimately lead to sepsis. This is when your body’s mechanisms for fighting infection start to break down and attack your essential organs. This process can lead to septic shock, causing damage to essential organs like the liver, lungs and kidneys. It can easily be fatal.

There are signs of the early onset of sepsis, such as high temperature, shortness of breath and mental confusion, and if it is treated swiftly, you should recover. But it should never be allowed to get that bad. The risks are simply not worth it, not least as survivors can still suffer from the effects of organ damage.

Be Thankful For Antibiotics

Indeed, at this point, you may appreciate why many people did not live as long in times past, although, to be fair, diets would not have contained as many ingredients that are harmful to teeth as modern foods do, especially sugar. Dentistry may not have been very advanced and antibiotics were nonexistent, but at least there were no fizzy drinks to rot your teeth.

A world without known antibiotics was the reality even a century ago, although some people had found that mould could somehow heal infections from moulds. Penicillin was not discovered until the 1920s, with Alexander Fleming’s work being built on by others who were able to turn it into a viable and established medicine in the 1940s.

Amoxycillin is a variant of penicillin and while there are many other kinds of antibiotics, which tend to attack any bacteria (unfortunately, this means good ones as well), penicillin family antibiotics specifically target certain bugs, including those that are involved in dental abscesses.

Get Yourself Checked Out

If you are suffering from some of the symptoms mentioned above, it is definitely worth getting checked out. If it is a dental abscess, you can get the antibiotics you need to keep the infection at bay until you can get a dental appointment. If not, our assessment may help you understand what kind of dental problem it actually is.

Quite simply, doing nothing is not an option, while you have nothing to lose in getting checked out, although it is possible that at the end of the process, you may have one tooth less. Even in that situation, you will at least have escaped from a world of pain and the threat of a deadly infection.