Salt Gargle
What is the effectiveness of a salt gargle? The Dentist recommended that I rinse my mouth with salt water every night because they found an abscess in my mouth. They had local anesthesia to freeze the area and then went wild poking it. It's nice they were so diligent because they thought it was my tooth nerve dying and leaking out into an abscess! That would lead to a root canal.
Fortunately, the x-rays look normal and it's likely a Gingivitis lesion (Apr 2025). I've had these as a kid and the dentists I've usually been to don't make as much of a fuss. I guess it's a good thing my current dental office cares for long term health.
Back to the salt, apparently it comes down to osmosis. Solvents move high to low concentrations. Water moves from where there is higher water potential to lower water potential/more water concentration to less water concentration. That means if salt water is being gargled, water from bacteria leeches and kills them via desiccation.
Apparently, when you gargle salt water the other school of thought is that it reduces the fluid in your tissue to decrease inflammation. It should be noted that salt rinses do not kill viruses/speed up cold recovery -> at least not COVID19. Salt rinses had no impact on viral load.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8519917/
May 2025
The next appointment rolled around and the lesion did not get smaller. The new theory is that it is probably a non-cancerous bone growth (exostosis). I likely damaged the area by biting, poking, or burning it somehow. Or it comes with the territory of grinding my teeth to cause micro-fractures. The osteoclasts remove the damaged bone while osteoblasts build new bone tissue to fill in the gap. They may have overcompensated to cause an exostosis instead of laying it flat.
If its still there in 3 months, they want to biopsy it to make sure it's not a malignant tumor.
This just goes to show the thought process behind good care, there were multiple theories and processes to check if it validates the identity or not before going for a different theory.