Dental Symptoms

The large majority of cases originate in the mouth itself, which means the solution is there too.

Swelling that spreads beyond the tooth means the infection has entered surrounding tissue and needs assessment within hours.

A jaw that hurts on waking and eases through the day points to muscles that worked all night.

A painless click is usually monitored; locking is not something to wait out.

Fullness and pressure at the very back of the jaw is usually a wisdom tooth trying to come through.

Most mouth sores heal by themselves within two weeks. One that does not is the single finding never to wait out.

A metallic or foul taste that brushing does not clear is often a sign of pus draining.

Dryness is not merely uncomfortable; it raises the risk of decay and gum disease together.

Burning felt with no visible sore is usually linked to dryness, a fungal overgrowth or a deficiency.

Numbness continuing after an anaesthetic has worn off means pressure on a nerve, and it is not waited out.

A sudden reduction in mouth opening means either an infection has reached the muscles or the joint has locked.

A patch that wipes away and one that does not are two different matters. Telling them apart matters.

In a good share of patients who arrive with earache and nothing found in the ear, the source is the jaw.

If pressing on your temple or your cheek brings back the familiar pain, it suggests the source may be the muscle rather than the jaw joint.

Jaw tiredness that makes you stop in the middle of a meal is often muscle-related, and above a certain age it can also have a cause in the blood vessels.

Your mouth staying open and not closing can mean that the head of the lower jaw has moved in front of the joint socket and cannot come back, and it calls for assessment the same day.

Your jaw moving away from the midline as it opens shows that the two jaw joints are not moving at the same time and by the same amount.

A rough, rubbing noise that carries on throughout the movement, rather than a single click, suggests that the joint surfaces have lost their smoothness.

Your bite, which has been the same for years, changing within days can mean that the position of a tooth, of the bone or of the joint has changed.

When the way your teeth meet changes after a blow, it points less towards muscle swelling and more towards a change in the position of the bone or of the jaw joint.

Pain after an extraction is at its highest on the first day and then eases; pain that climbs again, or never eases at all, may be a sign that healing has taken a different course.

Bone left bare inside the mouth shows that the covering of mucosa has opened and that the area may not close over on its own.

Sour fluid coming up into your mouth at night shows that stomach contents are escaping upwards; because saliva drops during sleep, the acid stays in the mouth for longer and can wear away tooth surfaces.

Jaw pain that comes on with walking rather than with chewing and goes with rest may have its source outside the jaw; pain referred from the heart fits this pattern.

Saliva turning pink in the first hours is expected; the mouth filling with blood within a few minutes and not responding to pressure is a different picture.

These are red islands with a whitish border, formed where the papillae on the surface of the tongue are lost in patches; their most striking feature is that they move about.

For most people the grooves on the top of the tongue are a surface pattern they were born with; the real question is not the groove itself, but whether the debris collecting inside it is causing trouble.

This is a whitish layer that builds up on the surface of the tongue and comes partly away when it is cleaned gently; whether or not it comes away is the first thing that separates it from a permanent white patch.

This is a change in the surface where the papillae on the top of the tongue do not shed but grow longer, look like hair from the outside and hold on to colouring substances.

This is a shiny, flat appearance that comes out when the papillae on the surface of the tongue are lost; most of the time the reason lies not in the mouth but in a deficiency to be looked for in the blood.

The wavy indentations along both sides of the tongue show that it is pressing constantly against the teeth; the marks are not on the top of the tongue but on the edge that meets the teeth.

Ulcers that keep returning point to the background feeding them rather than to any single sore; cycles that carry on for months raise everything from nutritional deficiencies to mechanical irritation.

A red patch inside the mouth that will not wipe away and looks like velvet means the surface layer of the lining has thinned; this is a finding to be assessed, not one to wait out.

Fine white lines resembling lace on the lining of the cheek may show that the lining is thickening in places as part of an immune reaction; not wiping away, and usually being present on both sides, are their familiar features.

Unlike dry lips, a crack at the two corners of the mouth is most often kept going by saliva pooling in that fold, softening the skin and letting micro-organisms settle there.

A cold sore appears when a virus lying quietly at a nerve root is reactivated by certain triggers; starting with tingling at the edge of the lip is what sets it apart from other sores in the mouth.

Swelling of the lip and tongue that comes on within minutes is different from the swelling of an infection that grows over days, and it can narrow the airway.

Restricted tongue movement points to two separate stories: a band you were born with, or a swelling or hardening that has developed since.

A sore under a denture is most often the sign of a pressure point; if it has not closed within two weeks, that suggests the denture is not the explanation.

Loss of taste is most often not a problem with the tongue but with smell, or with the saliva that keeps your mouth wet; finding which one is missing sets the direction.

A soft, clear or bluish bubble appearing inside the mouth most often forms when the duct of a small salivary gland is damaged and leaks its fluid into the surrounding tissue.

A lump inside the mouth that is hard, does not shift and has not got smaller for weeks is assessed separately from a fluid-filled blister and from the swelling of an infection.

A cold sore scabs over and closes within a few days; a scab that stays in the same place for weeks and forms again every time it falls off is telling you something else.

When widespread sores inside the mouth come with a fever, teething is usually not the explanation and an infection is more likely; in the first few days what matters most is whether your child can keep drinking.

Pain that starts on its own and beats like a pulse means the nerve has passed the point of return.

How long the pain lasts is the most reliable clue to which tissue is involved.

Movement in a permanent tooth is not a normal stage; it means the support holding it has been lost.

A tooth surface flattening is a sign of force, not of age.

A change in colour can be a surface stain, or decay advancing beneath the enamel.

Whether the pain comes as you bite or as you release tells you a great deal about which problem you are facing.

Trapping at the same spot every time means the contact between two teeth has broken down, and the cause is usually repairable.

Whether the colour comes from outside or inside determines which treatment will work.

Teeth that stood in the same place for years starting to move means the support holding them has changed.

A tooth that hurts when the pressure changes usually gives away a tooth that stays quiet on the ground but already has something wrong with it; the point in the flight at which the pain starts narrows down where it is coming from.

A tooth knocked out, broken or loosened by a blow is one of the few true emergencies in dentistry; how quickly you act affects the outcome as much as what you do.

The lymph glands under your jaw and in your neck swell when they react to an infection nearby, and a gland that is tender and moves under your finger most often reflects that reaction.

Being painless is not a reassuring sign. A neck lump that feels hard, will not move and has lasted more than three weeks is a finding that needs assessing in its own right.

Your neck and your jaw share the same chain of muscles. A stiff neck most often comes from the muscles, but the signs that go with it can change the picture completely.

A sore throat that stays on one side only points less towards a cold than towards a tooth, a gum or a tonsil on that side.

Difficulty swallowing can be the first sign that a swelling in the mouth and neck has begun to narrow the airway, and this symptom is not one to manage by watching it at home.

This feeling does not stop you swallowing and is more noticeable between meals. Most often it describes a sensation coming from muscle and lining rather than a real object in the throat.

Hoarseness that lasts more than three weeks suggests there is a change in the vocal cords that needs to be looked at; the hoarseness left behind by a cold does not go on this long.

Swelling in the neck that arrives together with a fever shows that an infection in the mouth may have spread beyond its own area, and this is not a picture to sit and watch.

The small white lumps that come up into your mouth when you cough, or on their own, usually form when debris collecting in the narrow pockets on the surface of the tonsils becomes packed together.

Snoring is the sound made when the airway narrows during sleep and the soft tissues vibrate; how loud it is does not on its own show how big the problem is.

A pause in breathing that someone else has seen is the strongest sign that the airway closes completely for a while during sleep.

Waking from sleep as though you are choking, or hungry for air, is the situation where you notice for yourself the moment the airway closes.

Being sleepy during the day even though you sleep for long enough suggests the problem may lie not in how long you sleep, but in the quality of that sleep.

Breathing through the mouth instead of the nose means the route that warms, moistens and filters the air is out of use; the consequences show up first inside the mouth.

A dry mouth that belongs to the morning alone suggests you have been breathing through your mouth all night, and that your airway may have narrowed during sleep.

You are not the one who hears the grinding; the person sleeping next to you is. That sound tells you your jaw has been working on its own through the night and your teeth have been rubbing against each other.

Snoring that carries on all night in a child, together with sleeping with the mouth open, shows that air is not passing easily through the nose; this can also affect how the jaws develop.

A blocked nose that stays on the same side tells you something different from one that affects both sides; the source may lie inside the nose, or in your upper back teeth.

Mucus running down the back of the throat can go along with constant throat clearing, feeling sick in the morning and bad breath.

Nasal discharge that smells bad and mostly comes from one side is different from an ordinary cold; its source may be a tooth lying next to the sinus above your upper back teeth.

Pressure in the face that rises when you bend forward, cough or lie down means the source of the pain has to be looked for in the air spaces of the face rather than in a tooth.

An ear that feels full or under pressure does not always come from the ear itself; the source may be the Eustachian tube, or the jaw joint just in front of it.

Hearing a sound that has no source outside you; the cause is looked for first along the hearing pathway, and the part played by the jaw joint is narrower than people think.

Liquid passing from your mouth into your nose usually suggests that there is an opening between the mouth and the sinus in your upper jaw that has not closed.

Your temple is where one of your strongest chewing muscles sits, so pain there is often as much about how you use your jaw as it is about headache.

Pain that is already there the moment you wake suggests that whatever produces it may have more to do with what happens while you sleep than with your day.

When sensitivity to light and sound joins a throbbing pain on one side, the picture moves away from a pain that comes from a tooth and points somewhere else.

A pressing feeling that wraps around the head, does not throb and takes both sides at once brings muscle tension to mind rather than a pain arising in a blood vessel.

Pain around the eye does not always come from the eye; the upper teeth, the sinuses and some types of headache can send their pain to the same area.

Every face is asymmetrical to some degree; what matters is not that a difference exists but that it is new or is becoming more obvious.

Pain on one side of the face that lasts only seconds and feels like an electric shock usually comes not from a tooth, but from the nerve that carries sensation in your face.

A local anaesthetic normally wears off within a few hours. Numbness that is still there the next day is not about how long the drug lasts, but about the state of the nerve.

Numbness that affects only one side of the tongue has to do with the nerve carrying feeling on that side; tingling that affects both sides at once tells a different story.

One side of the face dropping suddenly is not a sign to wait on; the first thing to do is to have a stroke ruled out in an emergency department.

Twitching is a muscle contracting briefly on its own. It is not a loss of strength, and it usually has to do with tiredness or with a nerve rather than with your jaw.

A watering eye and a blocked nose on one side that arrive at the same moment as the pain show which route the pain is travelling; they are not what you would expect alongside toothache.

A swelling that comes up under the jaw as soon as you start eating and then goes down on its own after a while is a familiar description of saliva that cannot get out through its duct.

A swelling in front of the ear can come from the largest salivary gland in the face; because that gland spreads over the jaw joint, it is often taken for a problem in the joint.

A change in the consistency of your saliva is a sign that the flow has dropped; it comes before the mouth actually feels dry and it is not easy to spot.

Two separate groups of glands drying up in the same period brings to mind a shared cause affecting all of them rather than two coincidences.

Cloudy, yellowish fluid instead of clear saliva coming from the opening of the duct is a direct sign that the contents of the salivary gland have become inflamed.

Blood when you brush is almost always a sign of inflammation, not of brushing too hard.

Healthy gum is pale pink and firm. Redness and swelling mean the tissue is responding with inflammation.

Teeth do not grow; the gum pulls back and exposes root surface that used to be covered.