I’m in considerable pain as I type this (you may have noticed a certain ‘edge’ to my recent posts) from a broken and abcessed tooth. :mad: While I sit here and contemplate extreme violence to various innocent inanimate objects, I’m also wondering why teeth have nerves in the first place? I can understand the pulp, as teeth musst have needed nourishment while growing, but do the nerves serve any purpose other than giving us a great opportunity to experience pain?
Gosh, I wish they didn’t.
About 12 years ago, one of my teeth started “dying”.
It gave me jolts!
What a horrible feeling.
Pain is a drag, no doubt about it. But it serves to protect us from injury. Tranquilis, I’ll bet that if you chew anything right now, you will carefully avoid the bad tooth. That protects it from further injury.
A product like Orajel (sp?) will help until you can see a dentist.
Oh, I’ve seen the dentist already (8:15pm last night). It’s just taking a while for the drugs to do their thing. Penicillin to kill the infection, hydrocodone for the pain. Once the infection is handled, he can see about stabilizing and repairing the tooth (about $2000 worth of work).
The pain killer is only taking the raw edge off the pain, and Oragel doesn’t even touch it. Your point about the pain making me avoid biting down on the tooth makes sense, though.
The nerves in your tooth are doing the same job as the nerves anywhere else in your body. It’s reporting that this part is damaged. It’s requesting that if you know what could be causing the damage then perhaps you might want to stop it ASAP. It’s reminding you to avoid putting any further strain on the part concerned.
Unfortunately, in your case the nerve isn’t telling you much that you don’t already know or can do anything about. But the nerve isn’t to know that. You could be sticking a lit match in your mouth for all it knows.
Even pain has a purpose, otherwise why have it?
OK, fair enough, but I’d think that putting a lit match or a something similarly injurious could be handled by the other nerves in the mouth, while in most cases, I’d think the nerves in the teeth would only warn you about damage after it’s too late. Am I wrong?
A related question, but a little bit of a hijack. Sorry.
If you kill the nerve, as in a root canal, does that kill the tooth? Is there any reason to save the root after a root canal?
I’ve heard different opinions from different dentists.
a root canal removes all living tissue from a tooth. The connective tissue that holds the tooth in place remains, so you have a home-grown prosthesis. Root canals are undertaken when the tooth is dying. If you didn’t do a root canal or pull the tooth, the tissue would die and rot and you’d be in a world of hurt.
a tooth will warn you before you do it injury, but not always. Bite down hard on a ball bearing sometime and see if the pain comes before the disintegration of the tooth. I’ll lay odds it does.
Remember what Moms Mabley always said, “Be true to your teeth and they will never be false to you.”