Just before I went on a business trip early this week, one of my molars started to hurt. Like hell. Going to the dentist was out of the question… for the next four days. So I sucked it up and took Aleve (YMMV, but that actually kills the pain rather than just muting it for half an hour).
I was concerned, though, that the tooth might be infected. Like I said, though, no way to see a doc, so if I did have an infection, those bacteria were living it up.
Thought that a peroxide gargle would be better than nothing.
After a day of swigging the peroxide, the toothache had vanished almost completely. Now it’s gone without a trace.
So does peroxide (sometimes) work as a toothache cure? Or is it more likely that the nerve died? Should I hurry myself to the dentist?
You should go to the dentist, but if you’re not running a fever, you don’t need to rush.
My guess would be that you have a cracked tooth, and that since you probably stopped chewing on it, since it hurt, it stopped hurting all by itself. Cracked molars do that.
It’s also possible that you did have an abcess at the gumline, which the peroxide might have cleared up.
But peroxide isn’t generally speaking a miracle cure for infection-caused toothache, unless you want to believe that there’s a gigantic conspiracy by dentists and the pharmaceuticals industry to make consumers spend big bucks on expensive antibiotics for abcessed teeth when plain old peroxide would work just as well…
You should still have him look at it. You can get blood poisoning and die from untreated abcesses, and if it’s not totally healed, it could flare up.
I’ve had a similar experience, but the problem didn’t really involve my teeth. In my case, I found a white sore on my gums (it looked like a pimple on the front of my lower gum) but it felt like a terrible toothache. In my experience, rinsing my mouth with peroxide or salt water (on the suggestion of an MD) relieved the pain and cured the sore rather quickly.
Of course, I am not a dentist, so it’s probably wise for you to see a professional in any case.
I second Duck Duck Goose’s recommendation to go and see a dentist. Yes, you may have stopped the pain, but that doesn’t mean you no longer have a problem either. If it is not hurting, you probably don’t have to run to the dentist, but schedule an appt. soon and have it checked out.
