Five Dental Accidents to Avoid
From a dentist in practice for 25 years
This article draws from my dental professional experiences.
After the blood has been wiped away and the teeth have been fixed, I wonder why that particular accident was allowed to happen.
Dr. Spock of the Baby Care Book said that design should prevent accidents, not promote them.
“Accident” isn’t a word to cover up careless and thoughtless design or behaviour.
1. Avoid furniture that is stronger than it needs to be
Doors that are stronger than they look
One patient came in with broken teeth because he visited a neighbour with a door that appeared to be wooden. It was a steel door that looked like wood.
The patient shattered his tooth and it needed to be removed. If only, he’d not walked into a door, or it hadn’t been steel that looked like wood, or had his teeth aligned so the one that stuck out didn’t get smashed.
Teeth like these that stick out are more likely to get smashed. Consider getting braces if you have a tooth that sticks out like this one, for the day you walk into a door instead of through it.
Head-steads for beds made of wrought iron
One patient, a baby of age 1, banged her head against a wrought iron grill headboard of a bed. She was standing, holding on to the headboard, and thunk!
Her only tooth at the time came right off. The wrought iron headboard acted as an unyielding lever.
The parents came to us binging the baby tooth with its full root — it hadn’t had a chance for the root to be resorbed and the tooth to fall off on its own as happens at age seven, because this was a one-year-old baby.
I still remember this baby’s name. She’s twenty now and has all her permanent teeth.
I still feel annoyed when I see wrought iron headboards on beds. What is that iron doing there? Why not have something kinder, like fibre-filled fabric or softwood?
2. Do not stand — or dance — on a wet bathroom floor while grooming your hair
Wet bathroom floors are more slippery when one’s overdoing the hair products, letting them spill on the floor. Add dancing to the mix, and an accident is bound to happen.
One patient did this. She was twelve. She shattered three teeth on the tile floor. The day she walked in with her hair still wet! All but one were her permanent teeth. She now has dentures for two of her front teeth. The third tooth is growing in and she’ll get implants when she’s older and her jaw is more firm.
Her mother was distraught. But if her daughter had avoided the conditioner, the wet floor, or the dancing, she wouldn’t have needed a dentist for another decade or two.
3. Running? Wear footwear that fits.
My patient was playing a game which was a creative variation of Tag! You’re it!
This game is called Pakdam Pakdai in Hindi, and it means Catching-Caught. One player, the tagger, who draws the short straw, has to run after the others until he/she catches another player, who then has to catch the next tagger.
The creative variation introduced by my patient was that the tagger had to change footwear with the person they caught. She called it Pakdam-Pakdai with Chappal-Change. Chappal means “flip-flops.”
She fell on her face in her friend’s flip-flops that fit her badly. Two of her teeth came out with the roots intact. Fortunately, her father raced her to the clinic within the four-hour window for reimplanting teeth.
The child kept the avulsed teeth safe in her cheek, taking care not to swallow them. We washed the teeth gently with saline and pushed her tooth back into her socket for a reimplantation. We wired them up and took the wire off after three weeks.
Here are pictures I took the day I did the wiring, and after removing the wire, three weeks later.
She needs cosmetic fillings for her teeth, but her dad refused to get them for now. He probably thought she’d just break them again.
That is not good for self-esteem!
4. Avoid cricket balls, cricket matches and stadiums
Refrain from watching cricket matches in the stadium. Players hit sixes (home runs) and you lose some of your precious 32 if that six-scoring ball hits your teeth.
The audience for cricket matches has ended up in the ER, breaking their noses and being hit in the head.
Cricketers play cricket with protective gear to prevent injuries, but what about the audience? Watch cricket on the television or not at all.
This photo is for illustration. Cricket injuries can hurt people much worse than this photo's minor tooth-edge fix.
5. Avoid cranking levers that can come back and hit your teeth
In his hurry to drink sugarcane juice on a humid summer day, one patient tried to help the fellow crushing the juice by rotating the crank lever. He lost his grip and the lever came back to hit him in the teeth.
He broke three teeth clean across.
I was able to save all three by root canal and crowns. He paid $79 per tooth. That’s enough money to buy a month’s supply of groceries for a family of four.
I don’t have that exact picture, because he was so traumatized it seemed cruel to photograph him before, but here’s another picture from another patient with a single tooth fracture that we fixed.
So there you go!
Those are my five smart things to do:
- Buy furniture that’s as strong as needed and no more.
- Hair products are slippery, use them sparingly, and don’t spill them on a wet or dry bathroom floor.
- Wear footwear that fits.
- Avoid sports with hard balls like cricket.
- Treat crank levers with respect.
Thank you for reading. If you have any comments or questions, do leave me a response. I’ll be happy to answer you.
All photographs, cases, collages, and patient histories are the author’s.
Here’s an article with a picture of the kind of sugarcane crank the last patient broke his teeth against.
