Pain in the teeth after white
fillings
Question:
In a recent checkup, my wife's dentist found three cavities. She wanted
them filled with white fillings, which the dentist did. After the white
fillings, she started to experience pain in all three teeth, and the teeth
had not bothered her before.
When she visited the dentist, he told her to wait a
week to see if the pain stopped. It didn't. He prescribed antibiotics. The
pain remains. He redid the fillings, and the teeth still hurt.
The pain is constant. Just breathing brings on extra
pain, as well as chewing or even her tongue rubbing against the teeth.
This has been going on for five weeks now.
—Stephen in Ontario
Stephen:
I'm suspecting that your wife was the one that brought up doing white
fillings—that the dentist was going to do
amalgam fillings but she said,
"no, I want white." Am I right? The reason I think this is that this
sounds like a case where the dentist really didn't know how to do the
white fillings, that he was operating out of his comfort zone in a desire
to please her.
I'd recommend going to another dentist to see at this point if anything
can be done to ease the toothache without having to go to
root canal
treatment. Go to one of the dentists on our list of recommended dentists
for doing white fillings.
Most dentists weren't taught in dental school how to do
these white fillings on back teeth, and the technique is very demanding.
Any of a dozen different things can go wrong. The pain that she is
experiencing after these white fillings could be from the cavity being
contaminated with saliva during the procedure. The pain could also come
from incomplete sealing of the cavity, from incomplete curing of the
filling material, or from too rapid curing of a bulk of filling material
in the tooth.
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