Few dental words cause as much fear as \u201croot canal\u201d. Most of that fear comes from stories that are decades out of date, or simply wrong. Here are the five we hear most often \u2014 and the truth.<\/p>\n
A root canal relieves<\/em> pain; it does not cause it. The pain people remember is the toothache before treatment, when the nerve inside the tooth is inflamed or infected. With modern local anaesthesia the procedure itself is comparable to getting a filling. Some tenderness for a few days afterwards is normal and manageable with ordinary painkillers.<\/p>\n Nothing we can put in your mouth works as well as your own tooth. Extraction leaves a gap that causes neighbouring teeth to tilt, the opposite tooth to over-erupt, and bone to shrink \u2014 and replacing the tooth with an implant or bridge costs more than the root canal would have. We recommend extraction only when the tooth genuinely cannot be saved.<\/p>\n The procedure removes the infected nerve and blood vessels from inside the tooth. The tooth remains attached to the bone by its ligament, is still nourished from outside, and continues to function normally for chewing. It does become slightly more brittle, which is why we nearly always recommend a crown on a root-canal-treated back tooth.<\/p>\n A properly cleaned, shaped, sealed and crowned tooth has a very high long-term success rate. Failures usually trace back to a delayed crown (the tooth cracks or re-infects), a missed canal, or a tooth that was already too damaged. If a treated tooth does flare up years later, it can often be re-treated rather than removed.<\/p>\n The number of visits depends on the tooth and the infection. A front tooth with no active infection is different from a back molar with a large abscess. We assess each case and tell you how many appointments to expect before we start \u2014 and we do not rush an infected tooth to finish faster, because that is exactly what leads to failure.<\/p>\n The tooth that hurts and then stops hurting has not healed \u2014 the nerve has died and the infection is spreading quietly. That is the tooth to bring in soonest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Root canals have a reputation they no longer deserve. Dr. Karkamkar takes apart the five things patients in Dombivli most often get wrong about RCT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[17,19,22],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-myths-facts","tag-myths","tag-pain","tag-root-canal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vardhamandentalcare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Myth 2: \u201cIt is better to just remove the tooth\u201d<\/h2>\n
Myth 3: \u201cA root canal kills the tooth\u201d<\/h2>\n
Myth 4: \u201cThe infection will just come back\u201d<\/h2>\n
Myth 5: \u201cIt takes many sittings\u201d<\/h2>\n
When you actually need one<\/h2>\n
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