A cheerful post

Reviwing my posts on this blog, I notice that a great many are complaints. I've decided to try not to sound like a grumpy old man, even though that's proably what I am.

So here's a cheerful post.

I think I may have discovered an osmotic cure for toothache.

Last weekend a tooth started to ache, especially under pressure. It felt disturbingly like an abscess. That was worrying because I feared my dentist might be unavailable until after Christmas, and possibly till the new year. I feared I might eventually have to pull the tooth out myself with pliers - abscesses unattended can be very painful.

Then I remembered my Rinstead Pastilles, pink antiseptic disks recommended for gum infections. I wedged one between my check and the part of the gum containing the root of the recalcitrant tooth and let is dissolve slowly overnight. A bit of it was still there in the morning, and the tooth was a little less sensitive,

Thereafter the toothache gradually went away. It might have gone away anyway, even without the Rinstead pastille, but I have a theory of how that could have helped.

I don't think  it was the antiseptic soaking through the gum into the infected tooth. Much more likely is movement of water in the opposite direction.

I guess that the surface of the gum is a semi permeable membrane. In between the gum and the pink pastille would be a saturated solution of whatever the pastille is made of, and that solution would almost certainly have a higher molar conentration and hence a lower osmotic pressure than the fluid inside the gum, so that water would diffuse outwards in the direction needed to remove the difference in pressures. That would have dried out the accumulated fluid causing the toothache.

Perhaps a sweet would have worked as well, except that it might have dissolved faster instead of lasting all night, but I like the idea that sucking a sweet might cure toothache.