As we begin 2025, our resolutions for the year ahead may still hold strong — whether they’re specific, detailed goals or more general intentions, such as correcting bad mouth hygiene. If your oral hygiene routine was infrequent or not thorough enough in 2024, you may be at risk of some tooth- or mouth-related conditions — for example, tonsil stones. But what exactly are these, and how do you know you have them?
What Are Tonsil Stones?
However scary these may sound, tonsil stones are relatively harmless. They’re merely calcifications that form around the folds of your tonsils. Tonsil stones may appear white or yellow in colour, and they’re never larger than a pea — they can even be as small as a grain of rice. They are a combination of bacteria, dead cells, mucus, and food particles that catch in the tonsils — often as a result of bad mouth hygiene.
How Do You Know If You Have Tonsil Stones?
The symptoms of a tonsil stone are fairly easy to catch — the most obvious being bad breath coming from your tonsils. Brushing your teeth regularly and gargling mouthwash won’t shift this brand of smell.
Other symptoms of a tonsil stone include a sore throat, a phantom lump in the throat, difficulty or pain when swallowing, and referred pain in the ears. Of course, you can also check your tonsils for spots of white (or yellowish) debris: a visual confirmation, more or less, of the presence of tonsil stones.
How Do You Get Rid of Tonsil Stones?
If you have tonsil stones, treatments can vary from simple to serious. Before you resort to the serious options, see if your tonsil stones can resolve from one or some of these quick and dirty (or clean, as the case may be) treatments:
Keeping an Oral Hygiene Routine
This is the age-old recommendation from a dentist: brush your teeth twice a day and floss once a day to maintain mouth health and prevent infections.
If you already have symptoms of a tonsil stone, this method alone may not suffice, but it’s a fantastic preventative method — and a habit you should be honing for a wealth of other reasons.
Gargling Mouthwash or Salt Water
While gargling mouthwash or salt water will not resolve bad breath from tonsils, doing so can help to dislodge tonsil stones. It also has the added benefit of reducing oral bacteria: the fuel that feeds the tonsil stone flame.
Removing Them Manually
Removing tonsil stones isn’t like pulling teeth — on the contrary, it’s often a case of poking around with a cotton swab or the back of your toothbrush. That said, if you’re having no luck dislodging the stones this way, you should stop, as forcing it can hurt your tonsils.
If none of these simple solutions do the trick, you may need to move on to some more serious intervention. Here are some strategies involving a helpful third party:
Taking Prescribed Antibiotics
Sometimes, the condition is out of the dentist’s hands. Chronic tonsillitis or persistent infection is a doctor’s game — and they may be able to prescribe antibiotics to treat these conditions. Book an appointment with a healthcare professional and you may receive some inflammation-reducing antibiotics that prevent further stone formation.
Having the Stones or Tonsils Removed
If you’ve had no success removing your tonsil stones yourself, your dentist may refer you to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. They should be able to remove those pesky stones — or, in extreme cases, remove the tonsils altogether.
Please note that a tonsillectomy is a last-resort option, and should only be performed in cases where tonsil stones are persistent or causing severe irritation. If the condition is recurrent and impacting your life, speak to your dentist or healthcare professional about your options.
Are Tonsil Stones Contagious?
Because tonsil stones are calcifications of bacteria and organic matter, you can’t ‘catch’ them from another person. The stones themselves cannot spore any more than pimples can. That said, if you have tonsil stones, you likely have bad oral flora, which you can transfer mouth-to-mouth or by sharing utensils. If you’re regularly exposing another person to your own bacterial buildup, that may throw their oral flora off-balance, incidentally increasing their chances of developing tonsil stones.
Noticing Symptoms of a Tonsil Stone?
Whether you have bad mouth hygiene or bad breath from your tonsils, the symptoms of a tonsil stone are your cue to see a dentist. A check-up and clean can help you understand what’s going on in your mouth, and provide you with some strategies for keeping tonsil stones at bay. We may even refer you to a healthcare professional or ear, nose, and throat specialist who can assist with issues beyond a dentist’s scope.
Start off the year with a clean palate — book your appointment at Abbotsford Dental today, and tell those stones where to go.