How To Help Treat Canker Sores

Oral health plays a vital role in one’s overall health. Doctors recommend that you should practice good oral hygiene by brushing and flossing your teeth regularly to keep your teeth and gums healthy and strong. However, no matter how great you are with practicing good oral hygiene, you can still develop a canker sore. Here is how to Treat Canker Sores.

A canker sore is an open and painful mouth ulcer that you usually see on the inside of your cheeks or lips. A canker sore looks like a small yellow or white open wound with red edges and would usually heal within one to two weeks.

When a person is experiencing a canker sore, anticipate that it’ll give a painful sensation that’ll make them uncomfortable to talk and eat. While canker sores can heal on their own after a few weeks, you may want to speed up the process by treating it yourself.

1.Consider Laser Treatment

Since canker sores could take weeks before it fully heals, you may want to accelerate the healing time as much as possible, especially if you have an essential commitment that you need to do in the succeeding weeks. One of the best ways to treat canker sores fast is through the use of laser treatment.

Laser treatment is a new and innovative way to heal your canker sore and speed up the recovery period by 49%. This article discusses how light can help treat canker sore. With laser treatment, you can see tremendous pain reduction, changes in size, and overall recovery. In this way, you can have a canker sore-free mouth in no time.

2. Use Topical Products

If you find laser treatment expensive and out of your budget, you may want to go for a different approach. Using topical products, such as gel, cream, paste, or patch, would help speed up your recovery process slightly.

You can easily purchase topical products over-the-counter (OTC) even without a prescription. Just ensure that you follow the directions to ensure optimal effectives. For most products, you only have to apply them to your mouth at least three times a day for a whole week.

When applying topical products, always use a cotton swab instead of using your bare hands for hygiene purposes. Dirt and bacteria can cause infection and worsen your canker sore.

3. Swish with A Mouth Rinse

If you’re not a fan of touching your canker sore as you think it can worsen the situation, you can try to gargle with a mouth rinse instead.

There are mouthwashes available in the market that provides aid in helping a person to treat canker sores. A diphenhydramine suspension is used as a mouth rinse as it has topical anesthetic effects that could help block the pain in your mouth for a short while, making the pain bearable. When using a mouth rinse, make sure that you swish it around your mouth for at least 30 seconds to one minute and spit everything out. Don’t swallow the rinse.

If you’re looking for a natural way to rinse without adding chemicals to your mouth, you can create your mix by adding salt and baking soda into warm water. After the two parts have dissolved, swish it around your mouth, and rinse thoroughly.

4. Adding Milk of Magnesia

Milk of magnesia or magnesium hydroxide can be helpful in treating canker sores. All you need to need to do is to gargle with water first to ensure that your mouth is clean and free from any particle. Afterward, apply a tiny amount of milk of magnesia into your canker sore using a cotton swab and let it sit for a few minutes.

Applying milk of magnesia can help block out the pain for a few moments and promote healing.

5. Consult with Your Dentist

Usually, you don’t need to consult with your dentist if your mouth has developed a canker sore. However, if you notice that your canker sore is enormous, spread out, lasts for more than three weeks, causes intense pain or a high fever even with medication, consulting with your dentist is essential.

When you have intense symptoms, it could be not an ordinary canker sore and would require the dentist’s intervention to treat it. Additionally, some canker sores are also a symptom of other diseases you may have developed. To ensure that you haven’t acquired any other disease, consulting with your dentist would be a smart move.

Prevention Is Key

Since you’re already aware of how painful a canker sore is and how long it takes to heal fully, you must do everything you can to avoid having one.

Here are ways on how you can prevent canker sores from happening:

• Avoid eating foods that irritate your mouth. This includes acidic, and hot or spicy foods.
• Limit chewing gum as it can irritate your mouth.
• Brush your mouth with a soft-bristled toothbrush, especially if you’re prone to having canker sores.

Ideally, you should avoid anything that irritates your mouth and try to avoid biting the inside of your cheeks as it can also be a cause of a canker sore.

Conclusion

Having a canker sore can be a genuinely uncomfortable and painful sensation. Fortunately, there are different ways to treat your canker sore and help speed up the healing process. Practicing good oral hygiene and avoiding mouth irritants would also go a long way in preventing the development of canker sores in the first place.