What Causes Tooth Sensitivity After Filling?

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Tooth sensitivity after a filling session is not quite unnatural – so you need not panic yet! In fact, a bit of sensitivity is quite natural – after all, if your teeth didn’t feel a thing after a session at the dentist’s (even though the dentist has been at it) – then it would be unnatural!

Your tooth might be sensitive to:

Air
Pressure
Sweet foods
Cold

Here’s documenting some of the causes of sensitivity after a filling session:

Immediately after the effect of the anesthetic is over, the tooth might feel sensitive. One of the reasons for this sensitivity could be that the filling is too high. Then you would have to let the dentist know who would then reduce the height of the filling and even it out. And this pain usually lets itself known when you chew your food.
You can also suffer a sharp shock in your teeth when they touch. This happens because the metals in the newly filled tooth and in the tooth that it is touching produce an electric current in your mouth – this is called galvanic shock. This typically happens if you use a new amalgam filling in the bottom tooth and get the upper tooth fitted with a gold crown.

You could face sensitivity in your tooth in case the decay was too deep and the filling was not the appropriate treatment. Instead, a root canal would be ideal to get rid of the decay permanently.
You might even experience what is medically called – referred pain. In this case, the tooth worked on is not painful; rather the tooth next to it emits the discomfort. This is because the pain signal from the tooth worked on is passed on to the nerve centers on the next tooth. However, this pain usually goes away after a while.

As you must have guessed already, tooth sensitivity after filling is not uncommon – and this sensitive feeling usually goes away in a few hours, or days, depending on what is causing it. However, if you feel that your teeth are too sensitive, you should get in touch with your dentist pronto – because that sensitivity might signal something more than just response to a filling session.