Whenever I’d get a cut, a scrape, or some small wound on my arm or leg or some outer parts of my body, I would never put a band-aid over it or cover it in any way. Eventually it heals just fine. I don’t purposefully rub it in dirt or anything, but I consider the possibility of the wound getting infected to be so remote I don’t even worry about it. It never gets any worse, the cut is always the worst when it happens and then it slowly heals and disappears. This happens even when the would is on my fingers that I use to touch everything, sometimes I would cut that little part of the nail on the side of a finger off too deeply, or pick at it, and it would start bleeding. But the point is that it starts healing as soon as it gets injured.
Not so with my mouth. I’ve always had issues with cankers. Most times, it would be because I bit my lip while eating. Then, over the course of the next few days, it would get bigger, white with pus, and then eventually shrink and heal in about 2 weeks. I get that infections are caused by germs, but since there’s no way for me to stop eating for 2 weeks, or even keep the wound clean from constant eating and doing other mouth things, why doesn’t the wound just keep getting bigger and bigger? Why does it get big, stop, then shrink? Its not like a cold, its not one strain of germs infecting it and then going away, because if I bite myself again on another part of the lip, I’d get another canker. What’s the deal with that?
Apthous ulcers, I believe they’re called, and why they happen is, to my knowledge, not well understood. I have them pretty frequently.
I don’t think they’re quite like a traditional infection, else there would be better methods for controlling them, I’d expect. I’m not even sure that whiteness in the center is pus.
I had a relative with a gum infection. The dentist was extremely surprised, because “The human mouth fights infection like a Comanche.” His exact words.
What really works is prevention - switch your toothpaste to one that doesn’t have sodium laurel sulfate, which is a foaming agent. I use Biotene because you can get it at regular drugstores. I used to get maybe one every other month, now it’s more like one a year - a very big deal for me.
There are competing germs that keep things in check… most of the time. There can be a germ uprising somewhere, but the immune system and other competing germs and viruses are using resources and competing for space.
If by canker sore you mean cold sore or fever blister, it’s herpes. (Not the genital kind but differed mainly by location.) Once you’re infected it never goes away, it just lies dormant. It’s a virus that lives under the skin.
Mine used to be triggered by stress. Biting your lip, out in brilliant sun, real stress (late report) would trigger one that might eventually look like it was trying to eat my face.
(Does it always crop up at the same site? Herpes virus.)
A tube of Campho-Phonique (sp) helped. And time. Sun block. And ageing, apparently. I haven’t had one in years.
Not a bacterial infection.