Treatments for sore gums fall into two basic headings: those that deal with using home therapies (often with the advice and supervision of a dentist or hygienist) and those that demand professional skills. Home treatments involve methods of daily oral hygiene. Professional methods, including professional cleaning and scaling of the teeth and some forms of surgery, are more intensive interventions. Using both appropriately can resolve many sore gum problems.
Home Care for Sore Gums
The first method of dealing with sore gums is to review your daily oral hygiene behavior. Your teeth should be brushed regularly, flossed or otherwise cleaned between the teeth, you should use a mildly antiseptic mouth rinse and you should be using a clean, well maintained brush.
Begin with the brush. It should be of a size and bristle hardness that suits you and designed to make brushing easy. Specially angled brushes for those with lack of full mobility can be used by anyone looking for extra ease in brushing teeth. After use, the brush should be cleaned and rinsed with an antiseptic agent: hydrogen peroxide used as a brush rinse is an excellent way of reducing bacteria colonies on your brush. This avoids reinfecting your gums through your own daily brushing.
Brush between meals, and avoid sugary or starchy snacks that can feed bacteria on your teeth. Follow up with flossing or consider using the range of other inter-tooth cleaning tools: water jets, tooth wedges and small inter-tooth cleaning brushes can clean between teeth where your tooth brush can't reach and where bacterial colonies often start.
After brushing and flossing use a mild antiseptic rinse. There are many good commercial rinses, but many dentists recommend salt water rinses and hydrogen peroxide rinses for patients with sore gums. These rinse agents are excellent antiseptics and safe for human use.
As a final consideration, be sure you are getting sufficient vitamin C. Many people, used to the broad good health of modern society, forget that an imbalanced diet can easily cause nutritional diseases, and dentists have been surprised to realize that they are getting more complaints of sore gums due to scurvy than they once did. A simple increase in fresh fruits and vegetables and a daily vitamin C supplement can do much to reduce sore gums due to scurvy.
What Can My Dentist Do?
Your dentist and your dental hygienist offer their own skills when you are suffering sore gums. Your hygienist will do much of the work. Basic tooth cleaning is standard. Using fine abrasive cleansers, firm elastic cleaning pads and gentle picks, your hygienist can take advantage of perfect lighting and a clear view to remove otherwise hidden or inaccessible debris on the teeth, following up with a good polishing to eliminate microscopic scratches and pits that can harbor bacteria.
In more extensive circumstances she can also scale teeth. This is a slow and often unpleasant job. When bacteria have formed calcified colonies below the gum line it is necessary to use a fine, narrow pick to ease down under the gum and scrape away the tartar formation. In many instances your dentist will arrange for you to have your teeth scaled in two to four installments: one half or one quarter of your mouth at a time. This allows for easier scheduling in smaller blocks of time and also makes sure that you have one side of your mouth left untouched while the other side may be irritated by the necessary scaling.
In particularly advanced cases of gum disease, oral surgery to clean under the gum, rebuild damaged bone and surgically restructure gums may be required. This form of surgery should be done only after careful consultation with your dentist and your dental surgeon.
A final professionally prescribed treatment that can be recommended at any stage or level of sore gum therapy involves antibiotics to help defeat bacterial infections. If you have been using good home therapy techniques and seeing your dentist with little improvement, you may wish to ask directly if an antibiotic prescription can help.
Using both home and professional services can provide good support to eliminate soreness in gums.
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