Root Canal Treatment
Sometimes a tooth can become painful or infected for no reason or can occur if it has a crack or deep cavity. When this happens, we do not have many options dealing with the painful tooth.
Our options for a painful tooth are:
1. Do nothing and let the tooth become more painful and become an abcess or swelling.
2. Extract/remove the tooth surgically. This will result in guaranteed pain relief, but the loss of the tooth will result in more costs and treatments to replace the extracted tooth afterwards.
3. Attempt to save a tooth through a Root Canal or Endodontics. As doctors, we prefer this treatment as it is less invasive than surgery, and more cost effective than replacing an extracted tooth.
Endodontics, more commonly known as root canal, is a procedure where the roots or nerves of the tooth are removed. This is often due to the fact that they are infected and is causing the pain. By removing the nerve, we remove the tooth's ability to feel pain. This procedure is statistically 90% successful. Like any medical procedure, there can be failures due to the tooth's ability to heal. After root canal treatment, if the tooth is not healing, the tooth still may need to be extracted or require surgery or retreatment by a specialist.
Our office uses Rotary Endodontics to perform root canal treatments utilizing a specific electrical handpiece. This tool allows the dentist to perform the process with greater accuracy. In addition, we use a digital device called Root ZX which allows us to find the exact lengths of root canals increasing our precision. Most other dental offices do not use these expensive devices.
