Car accidents can cause a plethora of injuries, from the mildly inconvenient to the permanently disfiguring. While the most common injuries sustained in crashes involve the axial region of the body (the head, brain, and neck), dental damage is a lesser known problem during collisions.
While dental damage alone won’t always send you to the emergency room, dental health is crucial to overall physiological health and requires immediate care. Even if you sustained worse injuries during an accident and think it’s best to put your dental pain to the wayside, it is important to consider what to do in the long term about your damaged, broken, or lost teeth.
Types of acute dental injuries
It is not uncommon for injuries to the teeth to occur during a forceful and catastrophic vehicular accident, particularly alongside orofacial injuries. Car accident victims typically experience dental damage when the mouth or jaw hits the steering wheel, airbag, or side of the car, but any forceful collision can knock a tooth loose or fracture it.
Acute injuries, including fractures, are the most likely to occur, although a tooth may even be avulsed in extreme cases. This means that the tooth has been displaced from its socket. The avulsion of permanent adult teeth is a serious matter, as they will not grow back on their own.
The treatment for avulsion is replantation, which should be done as soon as possible. This means that no matter what other traumatic injury may have been sustained during the accident, if your tooth has been knocked loose, it should be a priority to get it replanted.
Emergency dental treatment should be sought immediately after leaving the scene of the accident. Patients are advised to stay calm; a tooth fracture or avulsion is a very stressful and traumatic experience, so an accident victim is likely to experience shock.
What to do in the aftermath
Once the initial shock and pain has healed, it is time to begin considering your options financially, legally, and medically. Few people realize how important dental health care is until they are suffering from tooth pain or the aftermath of an injury.
Follow-up dental care is crucial. Even if you are the type to skip out on your bi-annual cleaning, your dentist will want to see you after emergency dental surgery has been done, according to an expert dentist in Lakewood, OH.
As far as compensation is concerned, it is beneficial to consult with a lawyer. If you or someone you love sustained a minor or catastrophic dental injury following an accident, you are undoubtedly wondering if you can claim this and how much you might expect to be compensated. Fortunately, most insurance companies are sympathetic to this type of serious injury and will compensate you fairly.
It is impossible to estimate how much you could hope to obtain, considering the subjective nature of personal injury law. There are far too many specific unique factors involved in each case to make an accurate prediction on what a court verdict or insurance settlement might look like for you or your loved one.
However, a personal injury lawyer in Ottawa or your local community who specializes in car accidents deals with cases like yours every day. This means that they are more than likely familiar with dental injuries. Once they examine the intricacies of your case, they will be able to help you build a strong argument and present your case in an aggressive and responsible way.
