Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine from EMC studios in Toronto.

EM cases is part of SREMI, Schwartz-Risman Emergency Medicine Institute, the nonprofit organization dedicated to improving EM care through research and education.

The opinions expressed on this podcast are intended for information and education purposes only

and should not be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition, nor should they be used as a substitute for medical advice and qualified practice and physician.

Here's the problem. About 1% of all visits to the ED are for dental complaints, usually for pain or bleeding.

So at the hospital I work at, that's about a thousand patients a

year. Now, there's a multitude of reasons to explain why the hordes of dental patients show up in

your ED, not to mention the cost of seeing a dentist. Now, think back to the last patient you saw

with a dental complaint. I'll be the first to admit that the last

patient I saw had a traumatic pain and they were suffering bitterly. But they didn't look sick

and it didn't look like a deep space infection or anything that needed drainage in the ED.

So I did what many of us do. I gave him a script for analgesics and antibiotics and told them to go see a dentist.

But after some suggestions from listeners and various colleagues to do an episode on dental

emergencies and learning more about dental emergencies myself, I realized that my simple algorithm

of doesn't look like a deep space infection or something that I can drain, analgesics,

and send to a dentist was, shall I say, pathetically inadequate.

And I realized that I know very little about dental emergencies, and it was time I bucked up.

So let's all buck up on dental emergencies.

Our guest experts on this topic I found through the wonderful Michelle Lynn from Allium,

so thank you very much, Dr. Lynn.

She kindly connected me with Dr. Chris Nash, a medical education fellow and emergency

physician at Massachusetts General in Boston, and Dr. Richard No, an oral and maxilofacial

...