Although you take good care of your teeth and brush them every day, you’ve started to notice small bumps on your gums that refuse to go away. What is going on here? Unfortunately, you may be experiencing a series of common oral health issues that require the best dentist in Fairfax, Iowa to overcome. At Christensen Family Dental, we’ve seen many of these issues before, and we fully understand how to diagnose and treat them to protect your teeth for good.
The Importance of the Gums
Few people pay enough attention to their gums when considering dental care. Understandably, they focus only on their teeth and rarely brush or take care of their gums. Unfortunately, this lack of attention can cause some issues that can be hard to overcome. For example, the gums may end up reacting to various external stimuli by developing bumps across their surface.
When these bumps develop, there are a few different potential causes that you need to consider. Many lumps are quite benign and will disappear over time, leaving your teeth mostly relatively healthy. These types of bumps are unfortunately not very common – most of the time, bumps on the gum will become a more severe problem and develop into a consistent issue that stays around for months.
Therefore, it is vital to work with a dentist when you notice these bumps developing in your mouth. A failure to take them seriously could result in a wider variety of problems that could be interconnected and difficult to overcome. Just as importantly, you need to understand the various treatment options available, as these can ensure you don’t run into worsened dental health.
A Potential Cyst
If you have bumps on your gums, you may be lucky enough to have a cyst. While these bumps are not a minor problem, they are less of an issue than most types of bumps on your gums. Typically, they form when a small bubble fills with an element, such as liquid, soft bits of a tooth, or even air. Most of them form around the roots of your teeth, particularly dead or buried ones.
Most of the time, these cysts are pain-free and can be easily tolerated by most people. However, they can become infected if they are allowed to grow, and bacteria invade their interior. At this point, the cyst will swell, trigger pain, and even cause bleeding. This situation will require a dentist because the pain, while not intolerable, can be upsetting and hard for some people to handle.
But even if a cyst doesn’t get infected in this way, it can still be a problem because it can cause pressure on your teeth. This problem occurs if the cyst develops very near the root of your teeth and continues to expand. As a result, you’ll need a dental health professional to remove this cyst carefully. Thankfully, this process is relatively simple and doesn’t require a lot of complicated surgical procedures.
Abscesses and Canker Stores
People who suffer from an abscess on their gums will notice that their bump continues to get larger and that it scarily spreads throughout their gums. They may also feel a rather intense throbbing pain in their head, pain that sticks to one side of the head, swelling and redness near the site of the abscess, and other painful symptoms that make life very intolerable for that person. A dentist must be seen immediately.
By contrast, a canker sore is less problematic than abscesses but can look similar. They are small sores that typically form at the base of the gums. Canker sores are not as damaging as abscesses and can be easily treated with a variety of medicines. Unlike some bumps, they don’t need to be removed because they will eventually disappear after causing discomfort and pain for up to a week or two.
Unfortunately, if you do have an abscess in your mouth, you need to work with a dental health professional to get it out as soon as possible. An abscess can be very damaging to your oral health and trigger many issues, including decaying teeth, and even cause bacteria to spread throughout the rest of your mouth. Therefore, you may need to get the tooth removed and will need anti-bacterial medications to avoid further complications.
Fibroma and Cancerous Tumors
A fibroma is a bump that looks a lot like a cancerous tumor. Thankfully, these bumps are not cancer and do not spread as rampantly or as dangerously as these tumors. Instead, they form inside your cheeks, along with the tongue, on your gums, and your lips. They will look and feel like cancer but won’t grow and don’t need to be removed unless you find them very uncomfortable or are worried that they may become cancerous. They likely won’t, but some people would rather be safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, some people may also believe that a real cancerous tumor is a fibroma and let it spread without getting treatment. As a result, it is essential to treat every bump like this as a potential tumor. Get a dentist to pull a sample of the lump out of your mouth and get it tested for cancer. If you’re like most people, there’s a good chance that the lump is not cancer. You can then decide to get it removed or wait for it to go away – most will eventually disappear, given time and patience.
What if the doctor pulls out cancerous tissue from the lump? At this point, you need to contact a treatment specialist and get those bumps removed as soon as possible. You must do it sooner because the doctor will have to remove more tissue around the bump, which could cause damage to your mouth. If you let the bumps get too big, you could suffer from a frightening loss of mouth tissue. Other types of treatment methods may also help here, such as various types of radiation treatment and even chemotherapy.
Don’t Neglect Your Gums
As you can see, bumps on your gums are no laughing matter. Therefore, you need to reach out to a dentist in Fairfax, Iowa who you can trust to handle this situation. When you contact us at Christensen Family Dental, you get access to professionals with years of experience working on dental issues. We fully understand all of these problems and will take the necessary steps to take care of bumps on your gums. In this way, we can restore your dental health to a stable and robust state again.