Dr. Jerry Williams of Urgent Care 24/7 discusses an important topic, what do you do if you get a tooth knocked out.

It is really important that you handle this properly. So listen up. If you're watching this video, you're possibly in the situation where your child, your loved one , or friend, or maybe yourself, you've had a tooth knocked out. The first thing you need to do is find the tooth. So get the tooth and carefully pick it up by the crown. The crown of the tooth is the part of the tooth that you see when you look in your mouth. Don't pick it up by the root, which is what's under the gum line. So you want to pick it up and you want to, you want to wash it clean, you can.

First of all, you should use milk. If you can't find milk, you can use water to wash it clean, and get excess dirt off of it. If it's the case of a child, if it's a primary tooth, not an adult tooth, you want to not replace the tooth, the only teeth that should be reinserted back into the socket are adult teeth.

Now, if it is an adult tooth, you need to be really careful putting an adult tooth back in a child's mouth because they can swallow it. But if it's an adult or an adolescent, and they've got a tooth that's knocked out, once you get it clean, you can either put the tooth back into the socket where it came out, or put it between your cheek and your gum line and store the tooth there and immediately get to a dentist.

The other thing you can do is if you can't safely store this, the tooth in the mouth won't go back into the soft socket because there's trauma there, you can put the tooth in a container with saliva where the patient that had the tooth of balls knocked out spits into a cup or into a glass or into a container and put the tooth in the saliva or you can put the tooth in milk. And they also make commercial transport mediums, where you can actually buy to put it too thin to transport it.

So if you can't get to milk, you can't get saliva in a cup, you can't put it between your cheek or in debt and the socket, you can go to a pharmacy and they may have these transport mediums, but you don't want to wait it's really important that the tooth not dry out. So you're going to go to the dentist and get to the dentist or to the emergency room or your urgent care center as quickly as possible. Finding an emergency dentist in many cities can be a big challenge. But what you want to do is you want to make sure you take the tooth as clean as possible and put it back in the socket if you can, or stored in your mouth. And what are the dentists gonna do? Well, the first thing that is going to do is that they're going to secure the tooth because the bone can actually grow back to the tooth.

Now, unfortunately, the nerve and the blood vessels and those things that once the tooth has evolved, they're damaged and they're not going to come back. So any avulsed tooth is going to end up needing root canals ultimately, but you can save the tooth by getting the tooth back in the socket and by securing the tooth the dentist will secure the tooth in place, so that it'll give the bone a chance to grow back to the base of the tooth and you can end up salvaging the tooth. Dr. Williams hopes this information is useful if you've been unfortunate enough or your loved one or friends have been unfortunate enough to have a tooth knocked out, but it's really important that you act quickly clean the teeth and store the tooth appropriately.

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