Root canal therapy can be used to relieve tooth pain, eliminate dental infections or abscesses and allows you to keep and restore your tooth that would otherwise need to be extracted. A tooth may need a root canal for multiple reasons. Each tooth has a nerve in the center and tooth decay starts from the outside and works its way in. Tooth decay is essentially a soft area in the tooth that is full of bacteria. If a cavity isn’t treated when it’s small, these bacteria can eventually make their way into the nerve of a tooth, which will cause the nerve to die and become infected. This often results in a toothache that can only be resolved by removing the infected nerve tissue from the tooth by doing a root canal.
How Are Root Canals Performed?
A root canal is done by using state-of-the art technology to drill a small hole in the exterior surface of the tooth down into the nerve canal and cleaning out the infected tissue and debris with tiny instruments. When the canal has been completely cleaned out and disinfected, the canals are then filled with a special root canal filling material.
The pain often associated with root canal therapy is almost always from the toothache that preceded it and not from the procedure itself. The tooth and surrounding tissues are numbed prior to beginning treatment, which allows the patient to be relaxed and comfortable throughout the procedure.
