Keep Ya Mouth Wet: A dentist explains why dry mouth sucks and how to stay dripping

 
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Disclaimer: The information presented in this article is for educational purposes only and is NOT intended or implied as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your dentist, physician, or any other healthcare professional. You should NOT use the information presented here for diagnosing or treating any health problem or disease. Never disregard advice from your personal medical care provider(s) or delay contacting your dentist/other healthcare providers because of anything you read or heard here. Reading this article and/or utilizing any of the information presented in any way does NOT create a doctor-patient relationship between you and the article creator or with any of the healthcare professionals in any way affiliated with this article. You use this information at your own risk. You should contact your dentist/healthcare professionals before beginning any new treatment or practice to address a health problem or improve your health. The author is not responsible for information on external websites linked to from this article or for the information on external websites that link to this article.



No one likes cottonmouth. When your mouth is dry, you’re uncomfortable. You drink water, but it barely helps. This nagging nuisance can have you feeling perpetually parched like poor Tantalus. It gets even worse than that, though.


Dry mouth can:

  • Increase the chance you get cavities by A LOT

  • Increase acidic erosion of your teeth

  • Reduce taste and enjoyment of food

  • Contribute to bad breath

  • Cause all kinds of difficulty chewing, breaking down food, and swallowing

  • Lead to mouth sores, sore tongue, sore throat, cracked and chapped lips

  • Disrupt your ability to speak clearly.

  • Make you susceptible to infections

  • Disrupt sleep due to a lack of comfort

  • Impair proper fit of your dentures

  • Make it really difficult to win loogie hocking contests.

Why dry mouth leads to cavities — Cavities are caused by bacterial plaque on your teeth digesting food and turning it into acid, which destroys your teeth. Saliva is mostly water. It helps rinse food off of your teeth so the bacteria can’t use it as fuel. Saliva also has sodium bicarbonate in it. Sodium bicarbonate is basic in pH and helps neutralize damaging acid. Other components of saliva include calcium and phosphate. When teeth start to dissolve from acid damage, the calcium and phosphate can be taken back up by the tooth to replace the dissolved structure and protect it again. If you don’t have saliva cleaning off your teeth, neutralizing acid, and adding minerals back into your teeth to replace lost tooth structure, you end up with more cavities.

Why dry mouth leads to erosion of your teeth — Again, saliva rinses your teeth off and neutralizes acid. If you drink or eat something acidic (like soda or processed foods) and your mouth is dry, that crapola sits on your teeth for a longer period of time.

Why dry mouth messes up your ability to taste — You need saliva to help break down food into proper little bits and slosh it around to interact with your taste buds. Without it, you can end up with a frequent bad taste in your mouth as well as a distorted taste for the foods you eat.

Why dry mouth contributes to bad breath — Again, saliva helps wipe the mouth clean. If you get bits of nasty hunkering down in a dry spot, the bacteria in your mouth can break that gunk down into a smellier gunk that lingers longer than you would want it to.

Why dry mouth makes it difficult to eat and digest food — Saliva contains proteins/enzymes that help start digesting your food as soon as it gets in the mouth. If you don’t break down the food in your mouth, the rest of your digestive system has to work harder and struggle to complete the process further down the poo line.

Why dry mouth makes you likely to develop mouth sores — If you rub dry things together, it creates friction. This can be useful if you are trying to start a fire with a couple of sticks. At one point or another in life, you learn that it’s better to rub human stuff together when it’s wet. Less human fires that way. Same goes for your mouth. You want things lubricated so they slip and slide around in there instead of catching on surfaces and tearing them up. If you’re not lubed up with the little bit of mucus in saliva, anything you put in your mouth becomes a potential weapon. You’ll also have a harder time swallowing. You’ll struggle to spit. You’ll struggle to swallow. What’s a person to do? Keep ya mouth wet.

Why you can’t talk much good when you has the dry mouths — This should be pretty obvious based on what has been said so far, but your tongue and lips are heavily involved in making most of our speech sounds. They need to be well lubricated in order to move freely and not get hung up and caught on dry tissues. Ever notice how public speakers take water on stage with them? When people get nervous, their “fight or flight” (or “tend and befriend”) response kicks on. There’s an uptick in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. This is the opposite of “rest and digest.” As noted, saliva is part of the digestion process. When you’re worried about a threat, you don’t have time to digest food. Your body shifts resources toward responding to the threat. Result? You get nervous. Your mouth winds up dry. You can’t talk well. Better bring that water bottle on stage so you can clear your throat and ask the audience to excuse you while you drink some water.

Why you get fungal infections in your dry mouth — Is there anything saliva doesn’t do? Saliva contains immunoglobulins (these are friendly miniature goblins that fight baddies in your mouth with pumpkin bombs) from your immune system and antimicrobial enzymes that help fight off infection.

Why your dentures don’t fit when you have a dry mouth — If you don’t think this is relevant to you because you’re young and don’t have dentures, pay attention. The reason you end up with dentures is because no one ever took the time to show you how to take care of your teeth. That sucks, and I’m sorry if you already have them, but if you don’t, follow all the advice lower down in this article and in my other articles and videos to make sure you don’t end up with dentures later. As you age, your likelihood of winding up with dentures increases (but it doesn’t have to). Older patients also end up often taking more medications. What is the leading cause of dry mouth? Side effects from medications. Now your dentures don’t fit because you don’t have a thin layer of saliva underneath them helping to create the suction force to hold them in place. Talk about kicking someone when they are down. You can still get implants to hold the dentures in place, but that gets very pricey. What’s more affordable? Protecting your teeth and gums so that you never have to mess with dentures in the first place. Your original teeth are WAY better; they don’t require denture adhesives to try to hold them down so you can chew. Chewing efficiency and power with dentures is only about 25% of that of natural teeth. If you have dentures, I’m not trying to be a big meanie and highlight your struggles. I’m just trying to properly advise the lucky ducks that still have their real teeth, so they understand how valuable they are.

Why you won’t win a loogie hocking contest if you have dry mouth — You will be incapable of producing a proper loogie. You might reduced to taking shots of artificial saliva when it’s your turn to step up to the loogie line. That will be embarrassing at best, and at worst, may be judged as cheating. Protect your natural loogie-generating ability. Keep ya mouth wet.

Now that I’ve convinced you that having a dry mouth is the pits let’s consider how to keep that drip.


Causes of Dry Mouth to Avoid/Limit if Possible:


  • LOTS of medications cause and worsen dry mouth

  • Alcohol

  • Caffeine

  • Tobacco products

  • Salty foods

  • Spicy foods

  • Mouth breathing

  • Cancer Treatment (admittedly, not the easiest one to avoid once you’ve got it)

The MOST FREQUENT CAUSE of dry mouth is medication use.

Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs — lots of their names end in “-prazole”) for gastric reflux are among the most common meds that can cause xerostomia. How’s that for a Catch-22? Gastric reflux wrecks your teeth with acid, but taking a pill for gastric reflux dries out your mouth and makes you more vulnerable to acid you introduce to your teeth with foods and drinks! What’s the solution? Ideally, switch up your diet to eat foods that don’t aggravate the reflux so that you don’t have to take a pill with a bunch of damaging side effects. Obviously, this has to be done in consultation with your physician. I’m NOT telling you to change your meds on your own.

Other common meds that can cause dry mouth:

  • Antidepressants

  • Antihistamines for allergies

  • Decongestants

  • Blood pressure meds (such as diuretics or beta-blockers)

  • Pain meds

Again, I am NOT telling you to change anything about your meds. I’m NOT saying your current meds are the wrong choice for you. This is just some information for you to consider. Please don’t blast me with hate mail over this. Hugs and smooches.

There is an autoimmune disease called Sjogren disease that can cause dry mouth as well. Sjogren’s also causes all sorts of other problems, but a dry mouth could be an early warning sign. If you don’t take any meds and you don’t use alcohol, caffeine, or tobacco much, and you don’t breathe through your mouth but are instead a faithful nose breather, then maybe you ought to consider Sjogren’s as the source of your sandy desert mouth woes. Sjorgren’s may also overlap with other autoimmune diseases you have been diagnosed with already.



 
 

What You Can Do If You Have Dry Mouth:



You’ve read this far. You’re crawling through the desert thinking, “Is there any hope? Am I doomed that all my teeth should be ravaged by the acidic desert winds? How is a wretched earthly being such as myself to possibly defend against the onslaught of oral dryness?” Vagisil. Lots of Vagisil.¹ Jk. That would be ridiculous. 

Here’s whatcha do instead:

  • Sip water or sugarless, caffeine-free drinks

  • Suck (do NOT chew) on ice chips. Ice generally provides more relief than sipping water, but again, do NOT chew ice.

  • use lanolin-based lip lubricants as needed (If you want to be a really fun person, say “lanolin lip lubricants” out loud 10 times fast each time you apply. I don’t know from personal experience, but I imagine the same holds true for vagisil.²)

  • chewing sugar-free gum or sucking on sugar-free candy or mints (but be aware that the xylitol in these gum and mint products can cause digestive distress for some patients)

  • avoiding salty or spicy food or dry, hard-to-chew foods

  • avoiding sticky, sugary foods

  • avoiding irritants such as alcohol (including alcohol-containing mouth rinses), tobacco, and caffeine

  • Avoid alcohol-containing mouthwashes

  • Use a humidifier at night

If none of the ideas above help you out, here are some other types of saliva substitutes and stimulants:

There is no strong evidence that any of these products is superior to the others. A lot of it depends on patient preference. The literal act of chewing gum is thought to help stimulate saliva production more than anything in the gum itself. Ideally, you want to eliminate the cause of your dry mouth, but if you can’t, I wish you luck experimenting with some of this other shtuff.



If you can’t cure the dry mouth, you can still help prevent yourself from getting a bunch of cavities with the following precautions:


If your mouth is crazy dry and nothing is helping:

  • use of a prescription-strength fluoride gel (0.4% stannous fluoride, 1.0% sodium fluoride) daily to help prevent dental decay

  • consider professional applications of 0.5% fluoride varnish to teeth

  • talk to your dentist about having some trays made to fit over your teeth that you could place a fluoride gel in for at-home fluoride treatments (put them over your teeth for 10 minutes each night after brushing)

As always, if you think everything I’m saying on my bliggity blog is a buncha hogwash, you can get the info straight from the horse’s mouth here from the American Dental Association. They use the fancy term “xerostomia” because they are much more scientifical than I am, but they are still talking about the dastardly scourge that is dry mouth. You can also learn more than you’ve ever wanted to know about what chewing gum can do for your mouth on the ADA website. Quick summary: sugar-free chewing gum may help with dry mouth, but avoid it if you have issues with jaw muscle pain or digestive problems.

Thanks for reading.

Your mouth should be wet like the above dog at all times. Keep your mouth cute and wet.

Your mouth should be wet like the above dog at all times. Keep your mouth cute and wet.

Footnotes:

¹ I’d like to apologize to all female readers because in writing this article, I googled “how to treat vaginal dryness,” and I don’t think I really had any business doing that. Sorry.

² I realize I’m awful. Sorry again. If you laughed at any female pain while reading this article and want to make up for it, might I suggest as penance reading Lindy West’s hilarious book Shrill? The understanding you’ll gain chuckling along with her insights will more than make up for my crude boyish humor here.

 
Michael Franke