Tips on Finding an Emergency Dentist

Unexpected events happen—and they often happen at inconvenient times. Dental injuries can be like this. A person can slip on a patch of ice when taking his dog for a late evening walk, causing him to slide into a pole and breaking his tooth. A child may knock out a tooth or two when he falls from the tree he was climbing on an early Sunday morning. Someone may take a bite of a gooey holiday candy on Christmas Eve, pulling out his crown or filling.

Things like this happen all the time. However, when they happen late in the evening, on weekends, or on holidays, regular dental offices are not open. These are times when it is essential to find an emergency dentist.

Emergency dentists are ones who are open for extended hours and days. Often, they are open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week—holidays included. These dentist offices are available at any time to help out with dental emergencies. Most will assist with any types of dental procedures because their primary goal is to help patients be free from pain until the patients can go to visit their primary dentists.

If you are in a very small town, it may be difficult to find an emergency dentist—you may need to go to a larger neighboring town. It normally is not a complicated process to find an emergency dentist, though—especially if you start by using our search tool.

Using our search tool—Find a Dentist—is rather simple. All you need to do is choose the type of dentist for whom you are looking and type in your location. In this case, you would select “emergency dentist” from the menu and then put the name of your city (or a larger neighboring city) in the location field. Click submit, and then a list of emergency dentists will come up.

When it comes to choosing an emergency dentist, chances are you really aren’t going to have a great deal of time to do research. You can, however, take a moment of time to click on the name of each dentist on the list to briefly look at each dentist profile. This will give you some background information on the dentist, such as his educational qualifications.

Ideally, when choosing a dentist, you would want to call around to the offices and call the State Licensing Board to inquire about each dentist. However, when you need to find an emergency dentist, you really don’t have the luxury of time. So, take the information from the profile pages and make an informed decision as to which dentist would be the best choice. Base your decision on the experience, education, and the amount of time the dentist has been in practice.

You will want to call the dental office to be sure it is open and accepting patients before driving up there. As with emergency rooms in hospitals, some emergency dental offices get very busy and you may not want to wait—you may prefer to select another dentist.