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Underneath your tooth enamel is a soft inside layer of your tooth known as dental or tooth pulp. Your tooth’s pulp contains connective tissue, nerves, and blood vessels. When patients have untreated tooth decay or suffer from oral trauma, this inside layer of the tooth can become damaged, inflamed, or infected.
To treat damaged dental pulp, we perform an endodontic treatment known as a root canal. A root canal involves removing the infected dental pulp, cleaning and reshaping the tooth’s canals, and then filling the tooth up with a rubber-like material called gutta-percha.
The reason we need to remove the dental pulp entirely is that oral antibiotics will not cure tooth infections and the physical source of the infection needs to be removed for the tooth to heal. Otherwise, the infection will spread to other teeth or enter the bloodstream, which can spread and lead to multiple different complications. Teeth that have received root canals often are protected with dental crowns.
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During your consultation, we will perform an oral exam and take x-rays to look at the condition of your tooth’s pulp. We will administer a local anesthetic to numb your mouth and will place a rubber dam over the tooth to keep it dry and free of contamination.
Then, we will drill an access hole into the tooth and scrape out all of the damaged dental pulp. Your canals will be cleaned and reshaped, which can take one or a few appointments to complete.
Once the canals have been thoroughly cleaned and reshaped, we will fill the inside of your tooth with gutta-percha. The access hole will then be sealed with a filling and we will place a dental crown over your tooth to protect the now vulnerable tooth from damage.
If you do not get a root canal, you will need to have the tooth extracted. There is typically no other alternative to a root canal treatment and we don’t recommend having a tooth removed if you can save it.
The reason for this is that while a tooth extraction may seem like an easy and quick fix, it leads to many unintended consequences. These consequences include bone loss, shifting teeth, changes in your bite and facial structure, facial sagging, difficulty chewing and speaking, and an increased risk of additional tooth loss.
While some of these issues can be mitigated by replacing the missing tooth, only dental implants can preserve the jaw bone to prevent facial sagging and bone loss. Dental implants are much more expensive and a lengthier procedure (3-6 months) compared to a root canal.
