How to Manage the Pain of Burning Your Tongue
Posted on 9/7/2020 by Northstar Dental |
 Rather than let a burnt tongue ruin your day, you can make the burn go away sooner rather than later with proper first aid treatment. And if the symptoms linger on for longer, you need to seek out medical attention at our offices as soon as possible. While you might want to sit out the pain, you might end up having a more complicated issue at hand.
In most cases, people end up with a burnt tongue simply because they were carried away by the aroma of a recipe or something else as they buried a hot food or drink in their mouth. Depending on the degree of the burn, some simple first-aid treatment with home-made materials can assuage the pain and irritation. However, in some cases, the degree of the burn can be so severe you might need our doctors to treat it at our offices.
Sometimes, a burning sensation in the tongue might result not from tasting hot food or drinks, but a condition known as burning mouth syndrome, or idiopathic glossopyrosis. This condition is usually accompanied by other symptoms like numbness and tingling of the tongue and mouth, and abnormal tastes.
Burning mouth syndrome is usually a consequence of preexisting conditions such as dry mouth, oral yeast infections, chronic oral inflammation (oral lichen planus), geographic tongue, food allergies, mouth injuries, etc.
The Best Ways to Treat a Burned Tongue
The instance you feel the burning sensation after inserting hot food in your mouth, rinse your tongue thoroughly with cold water and swallow plenty of it. If you feel some immediate relief, you can continue treating the burn passively by sucking on ice chips or popsicles. You can also try rinsing your tongue with a cool salt water.
If you have some tablets of acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen in your kitchen cabinet, you can take some to further fight the pain and inflammation.
However, it's important to call our offices as soon as possible if you're dealing with BMS, or if the burnt tongue takes longer to improve, or if it worsens and results in increasing redness, pain and swelling, fever, and drainage of pus.
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