When the nerve of a tooth becomes inflamed or infected, patients can sometimes experience severe pain or swelling and root canal treatment or tooth extraction is often required to stop the pain and resolve the infection. At Pearl dental clinic, we have provided same day root canal treatments and tooth extractions since 2007. This private service is available both to patients registered with the practice and to new patients. You can book dental appointments online 24 hours a day and if necessary have root canal treatment or a tooth extraction carried out on the same day.
We have the latest state of art 3D x-ray CBCT machine on-site which means that we know your tooth’s exact root canal anatomy 3 dimensionally before we start your treatment. The CBCT helps us to ensure that we do not miss any of your tooth’s root canals when we carry out your root canal treatment.
What happens during a root canal treatment procedure?
We first anaesthetise the tooth fully so that the treatment is carried out comfortably. For those patients who are anxious about root canal treatment, we offer painless dental injections and IV sedation. These options allows patients to feel relaxed and stress-free throughout the treatment.
The tooth is then isolated with a sheet of rubber dam to ensure that the area is kept as sterile as possible. This will also ensure new bacteria contamination of the tooth is avoided. Wearing a rubber dam will feel strange at first but most patients find wearing one for the duration of the treatment easy and reassuring.
A Dental Operating Microscope is used at Pearl dental clinic to magnify the root canals. This helps us locate all the canals within your tooth. The canals are then cleaned using modern flexible titanium rotary files. Root canal files are only ever used once by us. This minimises the chance of fracture and reduces the risk of cross infection. Furthermore, we always use high tech apex locators to establish the length of canals accurately and to reduce the x-ray dose to patients.
We thoroughly clean the canals with powerful disinfectants to destroy the bacteria colonies within the tooth.
Finally the root canals are filled with a rubber root canal filling material to prevent reinfection of the tooth. The tooth is then filled with a white filling core material. Sometimes, patients will be advised to have a dental crown soon after treatment to prevent tooth fracture or bacterial leakage.
What happens after your treatment?
You may experience some post-operative discomfort for a couple of days which usually settles down with pain killers. The root canal success rate is around 80% over 4 years. It is important to note that root treated teeth may discolour, however once they are crowned or internally tooth whitened the tooth discolouration will not be seen.
