Hockey and Your Teeth

Published Mar 08 2010

Sports are infamous for being physically taxing! Even the best players and athletes are constantly injured and forced out of games with mouth and tooth injuries that are major, minor or just downright raw. The roughest popular sport is most likely hockey. Hockey players are constantly slammed into the boards, run over by razor-sharp ice skates, hit in the face and mouth with sticks, and punched in the mouth and jaw while engaged in fisticuffs with other perturbed players. Hockey players are often seen sauntering off the ice between periods with bruised and bleeding faces, blacked-out eyes and many a missing tooth.

Tooth Injuries in Hockey

Painful tooth and mouth injuries come to be expected by hockey players the longer they play the sport. The mouth of an average hockey player is expected to lose several teeth to many a tooth in the near future, if this has not happened already! Some hockey players lose up to 7 teeth at a time!

Jonathan Cheechoo, one of the well-known players for the San Jose Sharks, was hit in the mouth by a stray puck and lost four-and-a-half pearly whites, reported The East Carolinan. When asked about the injury, Cheechoo replied, “You’re not surprised when you lose them [teeth], but this was my first time! I guess it’s nice to have kept them as long as I did."

Team Dentists

Hockey teams even hire their own team dentists that can help with any tooth procedure from digging tooth particles out of a player's mouth to giving him root canals in between periods – easing his tooth pain so he can get back out on the ice.

Protect Your Teeth

Several inventions have been created to help hide or prevent tooth wreckage in dangerous sports such as hockey. A few examples of these are mouth guards, false teeth, and face masks. Mouth guards and false teeth, however, are not extremely helpful in the prevention of a displaced tooth. Nearly all hockey players use mouth guards, yet the players still lose many a tooth on a regular basis, and false teeth are just replacements for previously misplaced teeth.

The only surefire cure for tooth loss is the face mask. Observe such a mask as worn by Dallas Stars’ defenseman Stephane Robidas. The hockey face mask is basically a light goalie mask, but not as heavy duty as a regular goalie mask. It is still prepared for 90 mile-per-hour slap-shots shot directly at it! This mask, though it may seem cumbersome, does provide the necessary precautions to protect the teeth of hockey players.

Remember when you are playing hockey that to be safe, wear both a mask if it suits you and a mouth guard to protect each tooth, and to make sure you have a quality dentist who is ready for just about anything!