Root Canal Treatment

Endodontics is the branch of dentistry that looks after the health of the inside of your teeth. This portion of your teeth can be susceptible to infection, which can cause pain, swelling, and the loss of teeth.

People lose teeth for two main reasons. Firstly a gum infection can cause a tooth to become wobbly and fall out. This is a very slow process that can almost always be prevented with proper treatment. Secondly an infection of the inside of a tooth can cause severe pain which can be resolved by removal of the tooth. This pain can develop quickly but can almost always be prevented with proper treatment.

Decay, trauma, or cracks can compromise or destroy the blood supply inside your tooth. Without a blood supply, which helps the tooth to defend itself, it is a matter of time before the tooth becomes infected and will begin to hurt.

Often they are painful in response to hot or on biting. Sometimes this pain can be severe.

This is a treatment where infection is removed from the inside of a tooth to stop or prevent pain developing. It is not painful and has a very high success rate of avoiding removal of teeth. It is similar to having a filling but takes a while longer to complete.

No. Root canal treatment has changed in the last 20 years. Historically, dentists did not understand dental disease as well as we do now and sometimes treatment used to involve discomfort. With modern techniques, the tooth is numb and it feels very similar to having a filling placed. We have many patients, who fall asleep during the procedure!

It depends on the tooth but normally between 45 minutes and 2 hours.

With modern techniques, they are very successful. Research suggests there is a 95% chance that you will still have the tooth in 5 years.

Normally a tooth will feel tender for up to a few days after treatment. However this settles quickly.

The first alternative is to have the tooth removed. This will remove the infection and cause the pain to resolve but leave you with a missing tooth. This can potentially affect your self-confidence and your ability to speak or chew.

The second alternative is to have no treatment. This is not recommended as the pain and swelling is likely to become significantly worse and can potentially be life threatening. Antibiotics can ease swelling and pain for a short period but will not solve the problem and the pain will return quickly.

Sometimes there can be some residual infection still inside your tooth. In some situations the treatment can be repeated to remove this residual infection. Unfortunately, there are some situations where this may not be possible. Examples of this are cracks allowing infection to re-enter the tooth, or damage by a previous dentist preventing us from accessing and removing the residual infection.

Sometimes a dentist may accidentally make a hole in the side of your tooth during a root canal treatment. This is known as a perforation and is a recognised risk of a highly skilled procedure. With modern techniques this can often be repaired.

Because of the nature of the delicate instruments we use in root canal treatment, it is a recognised risk that sometimes these instruments can break within your tooth. As long as the infection has already been removed from the tooth, this broken instrument will not cause the treatment to fail, and often the broken portion can be left within the tooth.

If the infection has not been removed from the tooth, then it may cause the treatment to fail. In this situation, we may be able to remove the instrument, however this is not always possible.

This is an alternative treatment; however removal of the tooth and placement of an implant is likely to be more expensive, more invasive, and less aesthetic. Implants have similar success rates to root canal treatment so confer little benefit in terms of longevity.

This is an alternative treatment; however removal of the tooth and placement of a bridge is likely to be more expensive, more damaging to surrounding teeth, and less aesthetic. Bridges have inferior success rates to root canal treatment so will not last as long.

Root canal treatments tend to weaken teeth slightly. The biggest cause of failure of root canal treatments is biting something hard a few years after treatment, causing the root treated tooth to fracture. Placing a crown on a root treated tooth is so effective at stopping this happening, that it is now widely recognised that root treated teeth should almost always subsequently be crowned (nhs.uk/conditions/root-canal-treatment/what-happens/).