Any one who suffers from mouth ulcers knows that trhey are literally a pain. So I thought I’d add my two cents about how I feel I’ve conquered them.

I get lots of ulcers. Or atleast I used to. I’ve got one now but I haven’t had one for a long time, maybe christmas was the last time. Yet I used to get them all the time. I often had one or two on the go at the same time.

So how did I conquer them? Did I take medicine? I did for ages but I found it just dulled the pain. My favourites were rinstead pastilles but I tried all sorts of things. Thgey said they’d speed recovery but I never actually let an ulcer just run it’s course with no treatment so I didn’t really know.

Then about a year ago I had a brainwave. I’d always noticed that during the day the ulcer seemd to heal a bit, by the evening it was a lot better then after I brushed my teeth (or there abouts) it got worse. (Light bulb moment) I realised that my ulcers were generally cuts in my gums because I chewed really fast. So I’ve slowed down how fast I eat. That’s helped loads.

The biggest help in actually helping an ulcer heal was to put my finger over it when I brush my teeth so the brush doesn’t make it worse. Then I make sure I sleep well. This works like a charm. I’ve had a couple of ulcers since but they’ve not got serious and have gone really quickly.

The one I have now I’m certain it’s down to not sleeping well and chewing too fast. Why, well we’ve just got a little puppy. Eight weeks old, the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. Of course it’s thrown my routine out the window and my bodies knackered. I genuinely feel that it’s like builders who haven’t finished. You’re body marks what work is left to do but it has to shut down healing until a later time because it can’t complete it during busy hours.

So I feel I’m not paying much attention to my chewing cos I’m watching the puppy, as you do, and I know I’m not sleeping so well cos I’m knackered. Guess what I get most ulcers at christmas when my daily routines go out of whack so I don’t sleep and I eat so much food so quickly I’m bound to bite my gums.

Any way the point is that I’m eating fine. I haven’t changed my diet yet I hardly get any ulcers. I have improved my sleep, stopped chewing so fast and found ways to protect the ulcers. but I havne’t spent any money doing so I’ve just been practical and let my body deal with things in its own way and helped it along the way by sleeping well.

I have also built up a small list of tips and techniques I use to protect an ulcer and help it heal. This is even more important when you have more than one ulcer because it gets so much harder to protect each ulcer as you eat go about your day.

Protection when brushing

AS I mentioned earlier I protect each ulcer one at a time when brushing. It feels strange but if you don’t you will notice that the brush irritates the ulcer just like picking at a cut and making it bleed. Once I started covering my ulcers they healed so fast I knew it was making a big difference.

Don’t stretch an ulcer

To protect my ulcers I’ve stopped opening my mouth as wide. Sometimes, when an ulcer is in a specific place, I even had to avoid smiling to stop stretching an ulcer and hurting it. It was hard but helped in the long term.

Eat soft food

Something I often forget that makes such a difference is to eat really soft foods that won’t hurt the ulcer and require little or less chewing. The action of chewing can easily irritate and ulcer and if you have to open your mouth wide you risk stretching your ulcer and hurting it as I talked about in the previous paragraph.

Some ideas of soft meals to give you ideas

• pasta parcels.
• Soup with noodles
• desserts of instant whip
• softened digestives in tea. 

I really like buttered bread cut up and dropped into soup, packet soup, tinned or whatever. The bread adds body to the soup and the soup softens the bread when left to soak up the soup. 

I needed to feel like I’ve eaten something so making something soft and limiting my need to open my mouth made all the difference.