Why Does My Tooth Hurt After Getting a Filling?
Dr. Matthew K. Norton has around 30 years of experience as a holistic chiropractor. His passion is to provide healing insights and strategies to help set you free to live a better life.
The goal of dental treatments is to make your teeth healthy and cure any tooth pain you may have. Having pain after filling your cavities is not only annoying, but disturbing as well. In such cases, people often wonder: Why does it hurt? Is it normal? Maybe the treatment wasn’t done properly?
Let’s figure out why the pain occurs after a filling, if it's normal or not, and what to do about it. The character of pain, its intensity, and individual manifestations are the things to pay attention to.
How Does the Pain Manifest Itself?
Usually it hurts when:
- The freshly filled tooth touches other teeth in the mouth.
- The filled tooth is exposed to pressure when chewing food.
- The filled tooth contacts with irritants (cold air, hot and cold drinks etc.)
Multiple components are needed for a successful filling procedure. These are the qualifications and experience of your dentist, equipment and materials used in the process, and the individual health issues of the patient.
What Can Be Wrong
If there were mistakes made in the process of the procedure, like a high filling or unhealthy tissues and enamel leftovers, weren’t properly cleaned out from the wound, inflammation is inevitable. An inflamed tooth is a common cause of tooth pain.
If the procedure required long drilling time, the tooth could have gotten overheated and the pulp may be burnt. If the filling is not tight enough, bacteria can get under it and start damaging your tooth. This is why the better qualified your doctor is, the less risk you have for complications.
Individual peculiarities of the human body also matter. Allergies may occur even with the best preparations. Sensitive teeth will also hurt more. Even the fear and stress regarding the procedure can make it more painful.
A slight pain after the procedure of filling cavities is completely normal if the nerve was removed and root canals were treated. These measures of treatment are a significant intervention into the dental tissues and cavity, so the pain is inevitable.
What To Do with the Pain?
In the first few days after the procedure, you can take analgesics to relieve your pain. If the pain doesn’t go away, talk to your dentist because the filling may have been done incorrectly. If this is the case, the filling is removed, the tooth is treated, and then filled once again. If the pain occurs because of an allergy, then the material for the new filling should probably be changed to a different type.
