4 Mistakes You Should Avoid While You Have Temporary Dental Crowns
If you have recently undergone a dental implant procedure, the dentist may have placed temporary dental crowns to serve as your teeth until your gums heal enough for your permanent crowns. While you have your temporary dental crowns, avoid making the following four mistakes that damage both them and your mouth.
Chewing on Hard Candies
While your temporary crowns are in place, avoid chewing on hard candies. When you eat these types of treats, the pressure you must exert to break them could crack and break your crowns.
If you simply cannot go without your favorite butterscotch or peppermint candies, do not bite into them. Instead, suck on them and let them dissolve in your mouth. However, you need to be vigilant while enjoying the candy, as you may bite down out of habit, potentially shattering one or more of your crowns.
Eating Foods Containing Seeds
Other than hard candies, other types of food you should avoid are any that contain seeds. These include strawberries, kiwi fruit, and stand alone seeds like sunflower seeds.
Even if you do not have to exert any pressure to break open the seeds, ones that are found on the outside of strawberries and inside kiwi fruit are tiny. These tiny seeds may be small enough to work their way under the gap between the crown and your gum.
If the seeds become trapped, they could pry the crown off when you try to remove them. Also, the seeds could rub on your gums, irritating the implant surgical site that is still healing.
Neglecting Your Gums
While caring for and keeping your temporary crowns safe from damage, do not forget to pay attention to the health of your gums. As stated in the previous section, the implant sites are likely still healing. If you neglect your gums and do not keep them clean, an abscess could form that has the potential to cause blood poisoning or sepsis.
Every time you get up in the morning and after every meal, brush your teeth as you normally do. Then, rinse your mouth with two teaspoons of salt mixed with a quarter of a cup of cool water. The salt in this simple homemade mouthwash will kill bacteria that have become trapped in the gaps between your crowns and gums.
After rinsing your mouth, you should also floss your teeth after every meal. However, you may need to change the way your floss your teeth, as described in the next section.
Flossing the Way Your Parents Showed You
More than likely, your parents probably showed you how to floss your teeth when you were a child. The technique you may have been shown was to place the floss between two teeth, wiggle the string around the gum and sides of the teeth, then pull straight up.
While this is an acceptable technique for flossing natural teeth, you should change things up when you have temporary crowns. If you pull up on the floss when you are finished, you risk snagging the string on the bottom of the crown.
This increases the risk of you pulling the crown up and dislodging it from the implant abutment. Depending on how well the site is healing, you also risk pulling the metal post out as well.
Instead of pulling the floss up after you are finished, slide it through your teeth. This keeps you from pulling on the crown and possibly damaging it, the implant, and your gums.
When you avoid the above mistakes, you increase your chances of keeping your temporary crowns intact until you receive your permanent ones. However, if something does happen to your temporary dental crowns, contact a dentist, such as one from Airport Road Dental Associates, right away to seek their advice on what you need to do.
