Root Canal Treatment in Pune (RCT) is most commonly a painless procedure (more than 90% to be precise, at Smilekraft Dentistry, Pune) that will preserve your tooth and keep the structure from becoming damaged due to infection or trauma. In a nutshell, a root canal is actually your tooth saviour. The name Root Canal comes from the fact that the treatment is of the root part of the tooth, and more specifically, in the canal part of the root where the nerve endings, blood vessels, and connective tissue of the tooth reside.
To understand this endodontic treatment, it helps to know something about the anatomy of a tooth. Inside the tooth, under the white enamel and a hard layer called dentin, is a soft tissue called the pulp. The pulp contains blood vessels, nerves, and connective tissue and extends from the crown of the tooth to the tip of the roots where it connects to the tissues surrounding the root. This pulp is important during the tooth’s growth and development. In a fully developed tooth, it remains as a remnant of the soft tissue that initiated the tooth development.
Later in life, its only function is to cause pain when something goes wrong. Thus, it acts like an alarm system which may or may not work but is not necessary for the tooth. Thus, once the tooth is fully mature, it can survive without the pulp because the tooth continues to be nourished by the tissues surrounding it, viz. gums and the bone. And that is the fact and the principle on which the procedure and success of our treatment resides.
When do you need a root canal treatment?
Simply put, if you want to save your tooth and use it for a lifetime without any problem, then a root canal treatment is the best bet for the diseased tooth.
We may perform a root canal treatment if:
We consider each and every human being to be uniquely different. The same also applies to each and every tooth in the oral cavity. As given above, you may need a root canal for various causes irrespective of any symptom related to pain. Pain is a very subjective feeling that varies with each individual. Similarly, each and every tooth may show different symptoms depending upon its location, anatomy, usage, disease and time. While discomfort and pain can be treated with various other methods, a dental root canal treatment is the best way to free the tooth from infection and problems for a lifetime.
Our decision to perform a root canal treatment for a tooth is thus always based on the physical, biological and radio graphical condition of your tooth along with your symptoms and needs and never solely based on the symptom of pain. Our main and only reason to do a root canal is to make even a single tooth useful and functional that lasts you a lifetime. We try to do this in the most comfortable and painless way, succeeding more than 90% of the time. If the procedure starts to become slightly uncomfortable for you, we stop the procedure immediately and proceed ahead slowly after some interval, taking care that you feel absolutely no pain further during the treatment. We go ahead doing this using our highly effective numbing or anaesthetic techniques along with using our cutting edge WaterLase laser.
We describe the step by step procedure of the root canal performed by a team of the best endodontists and root canal specialists in Pune at Smilekraft Dentistry with the help of a few pictures and radiographs of our own patient. If you have a root canal infection then Smilekraft Dentistry is the best option for your root canal treatment in Pune.
Suppose you have a tooth with a huge cavity in it. It doesn’t hurt much but is discomforting enough for you to have been avoiding eating from that side for some time. The situation with this lady was similar. You will be able to notice a lot of food and tartar deposition in and around the teeth and gums. That happens when one avoids chewing from one side. It just makes the situation worse in the long run.
Nevertheless, we start treating the tooth by anaesthetizing it gently, using a local anaesthetic agent. Then the tooth is cleansed of all the decay, tartar and food debris exposing the pulp chamber, to gain access to the root canal system. The tiny holes that you see in the picture are the openings of the canals in the pulp chamber.
After gaining access, the length of the root is measured using a high-end instrument called the apex locator. The benefit of using this instrument is that it gives us the precise length of the tooth root that needs to be cleaned in seconds without you going through any time consuming multiple X-ray exposures that were needed before the advent of this technology.
Then the tooth is bio-mechanically cleaned using our Rotary endodontic system that is by far technologically superior to the other common root canal cleaning materials. Once the tooth is completely clean, we fill the root canal space with a rubber-resin like material called Gutta-percha along with a liquid sealer to completely seal off the tooth from any source of infection.
The first radio graphic image shows the root canal space of the same tooth and the second image is after the placement of the final filling in the canals.
A final necessary X-ray is taken to confirm the proper & complete filling of the canals till the tip of the roots. All this can be finished painlessly in a single appointment of about 45 minutes, if the tooth is not severely infected with pus below it.
In such severe cases, after bio-mechanically cleaning the tooth, we leave a medicine inside the root canal space and cover the tooth with a temporary filling for about a week. The next step of final Gutta-percha filling is done once the absolute drainage of the pus has taken place with established sterility of the root canal space.
For any of the above cleaning and sterilizing processes, we also use our WaterLase All Tissue laser, depending upon the situation and the case to get the optimum results.
Once the root canal is complete, the main functional restorative procedures for the tooth start. While a dental root canal treatment helps in saving your tooth by cleaning off the infection in it, it does not give the tooth the necessary strength to sustain your biting and chewing forces to last a lifetime.
To give your tooth that necessary strength, we start by doing a core filling that replaces the part of the tooth that was lost due to decay. Then the tooth is prepared by giving it a shape to receive a covering even harder than your own tooth called a cap or a crown.