Diagnosing Dental Pain with Walloon Dental

Diagnoising dental pain – your teeth can have many different kinds of aches or pains and they all mean different things. Some sort of painful sensation in your teeth means your mouth is trying to tell you something! Let’s try and diagnose below:

Short, sharp sensitivity to coldness or sweet things.


A glass of cold water or an ice creamThe pain is short, sharp and disappears quickly (in seconds).

When eating something sweet like a chocolate,  in one part of the mouth you experience increased sensitivity.

Possible cause:

Exposed tooth nerves. Nerves can become exposed fairly easily. Gum recession or tooth decay will expose the sensitive dentine layer of the tooth. Inside dentine tubules connect the tooth nerve with your mouth.

Dull ache or throbbing sensation.


A niggle turns into a constant ache in one of your teeth.

The heat from a cup of tea or coffee causes a tooth to really ache

Possible cause:

This is generally an inflamed or infected nerve. When nerves are irritated for an extended amount of time or when they’ve passed the point of being temporarily irritated this can result in tooth pain via a dull ache.

Aching dental pain that moves around the mouth.

While drinking a hot drink pain begins at the bottom left jaw, moving to the top left as well. It’s difficult to tell the source of the pain.

Possible causes:

This could be an inflamed or infected nerve causing what we like to call ‘radiating’ or ‘referred’ pain. Radiating pain can come from multiple teeth or just feel like it.  Referred pain generally travels from top to bottom of the side of your jaw. It’ll always ‘stick to its side’ and will never move right/left or left/right.

Pain in the jaw joint or cheek muscles

Waking up in the morning your cheek muscles are tight and feel like you’ve been chewing all night.

Your jaw joints are making a clicking sound with an accompanying pain.

Muscular pain is a tough one to diagnose. Sometimes it’s clenching or grinding and other pain can be a result of degeneration of the temporal mandibular joint (TMJ). Treatment varies a lot depending on what the issue is.

Pain in and around the sinuses

Your sinuses hurt and your top teeth feel weak and are sore when chewing.

Inflamed sinuses can result in referred pain to your top teeth due to pressure at the roots of the top back tooth. This can feel like toothache but it is not as common – so we recommend getting it checked out by a dentist.

Hopefully these tips on tooth pain are able to give you a bit of an indication on how to diagnose tooth issues – when you need to go to the dentist and what to do next.

When in doubt, always book an appointment to double check everything’s okay – the team at Walloon Dental would be happy to see you and solve your tooth pain issue.


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