A painful premolar and metronidazole

Awoke with a crescendo of pain in my jaw from the tooth that had already given me problems back at the beginning of September.

It had begun to flare up again over the weekend and yesterday, I'd managed to get an emergency appointment for tomorrow. Today, I did not think I would last that long. Fortunately, after frantic requests for any solution, whether with my dentist or not, I was slotted in today – I just had to last till the afternoon.

Alternating paracetamol and ibuprofen was part of the bridge to get there, the other was distraction by work and a short visit to the first session of the term to the Chinese brush painting classes.

Ms Kenny, my dentist, ushered me in sympathetically and established that the most likely cause was an infection and that the solution would be root canal treatment. Seeing as it was a premolar with three or even four roots, this would be at least an hours treatment – with additional equipment, by one of the other practice dentists – in a fortnights time!

But how to manage the pain? I left with a set of antibiotics (a necessary procedure before root canal treatment) and a recommendation to continue with the painkillers. Rather than amoxixillin, this time it is a course of metronidazole.

So far the pain has been reduced to a bearable level by the constant presence of painkillers, though I am not looking forward to waking up tomorrow after they have worn off and before the effect of a morning pill kicks in.

The advantage of Metronidazole is that it is effective against, amongst other things, anaerobic bacteria, such as those likely to be involved in gum and tooth roots. The list of possible side effects is not reassuring and I'm particularly hoping that convulsions will not arise.

A particular source of macabre amusement is that use of metronidazole in animal feed has been banned in the EU and US as a potential carcinogen. The inconclusive results of human studies suggest that in human's at least, the real benefits outweigh the nebulous risk. Source Wikipedia.