Find Emergency Dentists
Something important to know about emergency dentists is that they often practice separately from ordinary dental practices, so if your regular dentist offers after-hours or weekend services you should consider yourself very lucky. In fact, very few dental offices are open Saturday, open Sunday, or open holidays.
When you experience a dental emergency during these times, you will be looking for a very specific type of practice that specializes in the provision of necessary dental services on an immediate basis. These types of “dental emergency rooms” will often not offer the standard services that you would expect when you go to the dentist. You will not often be able to get a regular checkup on Sunday from a dentist who specialized in taking care of special emergencies because this is an entire dental specialty and it is likely that the practice has been put together from the ground up to accommodate this type of situation. So the emergency dentists that you find will not be able to generally become your regular dentist.
Also, you will often only get a half of the job done, whatever is most urgent and necessary. For example, if you have a very severe dental abscess, it will of course require to be drained and disinfected. Also, you will probably need to have a root canal done right away if this is occurring around a tooth. But a root canal is a complicated procedure that must occur in stages. It is likely that an emergency dentist will simply perform the first stage of the procedure, and leave you with a temporary filling. You will then have to see your regular dentist to have the root canal completed.
This is actually as it should be, because this mode of operation helps to ensure that emergency dental services will have a wider availability so that you can get them when you need them. Otherwise there would be long waiting lists to have emergency dental procedures performed. Also, it helps dentists who have specialized in emergency dentistry to become expert in their craft.
It is the same with any type of medical specialist; when they see the same types of problems and administer the same types of treatments over and over again, they get to be very good at it and are familiar with all of the different nuances and things that can go wrong. You definitely want someone like this, who will have a clear head when you are in a panic over your emergency dental situation.