Soul Dental Kids offers pediatric dental emergency care in NYC during business hours. Outside business hours or for a life-threatening emergency, call 911 or go to the emergency room. Below, we’ll detail what constitutes a pediatric dental emergency, but we’d like to start by offering the most important information first: If your child has a dental emergency in NYC, click here for contact options. 

In-Person and Virtual Care

We offer both in-person and virtual emergency dental care. If the situation doesn’t require immediate manual action from a dentist, then you may be able to visit with us online. Naturally, some circumstances will call for your child to be present in the office. We can advise you over the phone.

What is a Dental Emergency?

For children, most dental emergencies fall into one of two categories: toothache or trauma. Something is wrong with one of their teeth, causing it to hurt; or they’ve collided with a dense, immovable object such as the floor or a sibling’s elbow.

Toothache

If your child has a toothache, the first thing we recommend is brushing, flossing, and rinsing the affected area with salt water. A stuck piece of food could be causing inflammation, and you may be able to avoid the whole emergency dentist visit ordeal. Here’s hoping!

If the toothache persists, please give us a call. This is also a good time to administer Motrin or Tylenol in an age-appropriate dosage and give your kiddo a cold compress if there’s any swelling. Meanwhile, we can talk you through the next steps.

Trauma

Oh, there are so many ways your child can injure their precious mouth. A tooth can become displaced—an injury known as luxation. They may chip or break a tooth, or knock one out entirely, root and all. This certainly doesn’t cover everything, but these are the most common.

If one of the above injuries affects a primary, or baby, tooth, it is generally less of an emergency. That said, a displaced tooth may call for immediate intervention due to its inconvenient position. For baby teeth that are knocked out, however, we do not attempt to restore them, because doing so could damage the permanent tooth.

If a permanent tooth is knocked out, on the other hand, do the following: 

1. Recover the tooth if possible. 
2. Hold the tooth by its crown, not its root, and rinse it with milk or salt water. 
3. Place the tooth in a glass of milk and get to the dentist ASAP. 

Note: It’s important to remember NOT to follow these steps for a primary tooth.

Emergency Pediatric Dental Care in NYC

If your child has a dental emergency, please contact us here. If the emergency is serious or life-threatening, call 911 or go to the emergency room. Even when it’s an emergency, you can rest assured that we’ll work hard to make their experience a positive one. And with so many specialists under one roof, your child is quite unlikely to have a dental emergency we can’t handle!