Mouth Injuries

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Larry Klein. I'm a dentist here in St. Petersburg, Florida, and we're going to talk a little bit about mouth injuries. There's all different types of mouth injuries. There's that related to the teeth, and that also, just to the mouth in general. A couple of things that come to mind, as far as mouth injuries, simple things, too hot a food, a pizza burn, burning your mouth on hot coffee, things like that. Pretty easy solutions, take it slow, cool things off. Other mouth injuries have been trauma, a dog, a cat, and you get scratched, you get poked. We had one incident where a small child was running with a sharp object in their mouth, fell, and it was almost a fatal type of thing. Also, injuries of the mouth involve a lot with the teeth, and of course, probably the most of those are involved with sports injuries. A simple mouth guard is a great thing to prevent that. Football injuries, basketball injuries, karate, boxing, any of those type of physical contact sports. If you do have something like that, let's say a tooth gets bumped, gets hit, the body is wonderful about healing it up, but times it needs to be taken care of by a dentist, if the tooth is wobbly, if it's wiggly, has some mobility to it, definitely needs some dental attention. If the tooth gets knocked all the way out, a simple solution. Take the tooth, rinse it off with some milk, bring it immediately to the dentist. If they can have it within 45 minutes, a lot of times that can be re-implanted, without any problems in the future. Some of the traumas to the mouth can be prevented, obviously by a mouth guard, or a night guard, but those things that you can't, sometimes you just have to be careful. Probably the biggest problem I'll have with shattered teeth, can be simply a person drinking water from a water fountain, or in a bar, and somebody hits the person's elbow, and it ends up hitting the glass on the tooth, so a lot of times, it's just a matter of being careful, so for those things that you can't wear a mouth guard for, just really be careful, and if you have any questions about things like that, feel free to give me a call. I'm Larry Klein. I'm here in St. Petersburg, Florida."