If your child's tooth was knocked out, rinse it gently in water and reinsert it in it's socket if you can. If you can not reinsert it in the socket, have your child
it in his or her mouth.The next best thing to do is, to immerse it in cold milk or cold water. Then get him or her to a dentist as soon as possible.

If the dental office is closed, go to a hospital emergency room. Time is the essence, because after a half hour the chances of having the tooth replanted drops sharply.

As soon as the tooth leaves the mouth, the cells in its outer layer-crucial in connecting tooth to gum -begin to die. To keep the cells alive you must get your child to a dentist right away.

When you reach the dentist, he or she will readjust the tooth in its socket and fasten it with wire or bonding materials.

Your child will probably need a root canal within a month, since the nerve invariably dies. You will have to wait eight weeks to see whether the tooth reattaches itself. The odds of that depends on a variety of factors, including whether the socket was damaged and how dirty the tooth got or how much of the fragile outer layer was lost when the tooth was cleaned.

A child's tooth is more likely than an adult's' to solidly replant. No doubt of necessity, children are the ones with supercharged healing ability.

Learn more about this author, Louise Tucker.
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