The Role of Antibiotics in Dentistry | is cephalexin good for tooth infection

 The Role of Antibiotics in Dentistry

Hey, everyone, welcome back to my website.  In today's article, we're going to be talking about why we use antibiotics in dentistry.

 

So this is really, really important article. I do want you to pay attention. I'm not going to go into every single antibiotic. In fact, that'd be way too much information. But what I'm going to tell you is it's really important to use antibiotics as we direct you to. But please don't rely on antibiotics to solve all of your dental infection problems. See, for a lot of dental infections.

 

So for when you have a toothache, for example, an antibiotic is a form of band aid. Think of it as that, and it's not going to be much more than a band aid. Why doesn't. Why don't antibiotics take care of all the infection? That's typically a question that we get asked, or why can't we just take antibiotics and not worry about the tooth itself? It's a great question.

 

And again, I appreciate patients asking that and wondering, because of course they'd rather do that than to have anything done to a tooth. But the reason why antibiotics aren't going to be effective kind of lie in how antibiotics work.

 

Now, I'm going to show you on a model, which we have right here. So say you have a cavity that ends up in the nerve of the tooth. So this is the nerve of the tooth. A healthy nerve has blood vessels and nerve tissue going from a blood vessel source and a nerve source into the tooth.

 

Now, an infected tooth, the bacteria get into the nerve, they infect the whole area that you can see, and then they end up at the base of the root. And that's what an abscess is. That's one form of an abscess at the base of the root. So if you ever have a tooth that wakes you up at night with pain or you can't chew on it because of an infection, that's the reason why. Think of it as a pimple at the base of your root.

 

So why can't antibiotics solve this indefinitely? Antibiotics will get into your bloodstream and will get into the bone and will kind of take care of this at the bottom, sort of. It'll take care of some of it, maybe not all of it, but, you know, it'll take care of a lot of it. But antibiotics can't get into the tooth, so antibiotics can't penetrate the tooth. So that's why you actually need to have something done.

 

Whether you choose to have a root canal done to keep your tooth, as you can see here with this, or you choose to have the tooth taken out, that's up to you. It's your choice. It's your tooth. We can't tell you what to do. We can give you the options and we'd prefer if a tooth is savable that you keep it. But if you have teeth that are not savable, that is, if they've lost a lot of bone support and they're getting infected.

 

Okay, maybe if they've done that and it's not a good candidate to keep, maybe they should come out. But you can't use antibiotics as an indefinite crutch because eventually a couple things are going to happen. First of all, antibiotics are not going to work all the time. They're going to work to a certain degree, and then the bacteria that are causing these infections will become resistant. So then you can take the antibiotic all you want and it's not gonna work.

 

And then you're just gonna keep on taking something that doesn't work and the infection's gonna eventually get worse. So that's one thing. The second thing is that antibiotics, if you're on them for a while, aren't necessarily great for your system.

 

They all have side effects, so you don't wanna keep taking something that might end up causing your, say, your digestive system to not function so well. That's just one possible outcome that can happen or one possible side effect. So you don't want to be taking antibiotics too long for your infections here, for example, the cavity caused infections or for gum disease caused infections. You don't want to keep on taking antibiotics indefinitely because that's not going to help you. Ultimately. Whatever the source tooth is, needs to be addressed. So that's it for today.

is cephalexin good for tooth infection

Yes, cephalexin can be used to treat tooth abscesses and gum infections. As a cephalosporin antibiotic, cephalexin fights bacterial infections in the body by disrupting the formation of the bacteria's cell wall, causing it to rupture and die. Several reputable sources confirm that cephalexin is an effective treatment option for tooth infections and gum abscesses. For example, Drugs.com lists cephalexin as a treatment for oral infections, and a study by Springer found that cephalexin was effective in reducing symptoms of dental infections. Always consult a healthcare professional for proper diagnosis and treatment recommendations .