As endodontic specialists, our job is saving your natural teeth. When you come to us for treatment, you have a greater chance of keeping your teeth and avoiding having to wear false teeth or tooth replacements, such as bridges, implants, or a removable partial denture. If an infected tooth is extracted, you still need to fill the gap left behind to avoid diminished chewing and to keep neighboring teeth from shifting around.
As endodontists, we help you avoid this by saving the tooth. We have additional years of post-graduate training after dental school, so we can work extensively with the roots and the soft tissue beneath your teeth. Root canal therapy tends to keep us the busiest; did you know that there are up to 16 million root canals performed in the U.S. annually? This procedure also comes with a 90-95 percent success rate, which is good news when it comes to determining whether or not to have a root canal.
Along with performing complicated root canals, we also provide pulp therapy to help your teeth stay strong, fix teeth with holes in them, drain abscesses, help you keep your teeth after a traumatic injury–such as replanting a tooth that was knocked out of its socket–and root surgery. While mouthguards are helpful for preventing injury, there are always times when you can’t foresee and accident.
Because we spend so much of our efforts addressing the inside of your tooth through surgery, trauma and root canal therapy, we can help you care for the inside of your teeth carefully and comfortably. This is important because it can be challenging to pinpoint a cracked tooth. This is because the nerves in the mouth might be picking up pain from a tooth in a neighboring tooth, or you might be feeling pain in the ear, the head or neck area. We go in and diagnose where the pain is originating so we can provide proper treatment.
But let’s say your child receives a blow to the mouth and ends up with traumatic injury to the tooth. In this case, our job will be finding and treating the injury. If the permanent tooth is damaged and is still in the process of growing, the injury can prevent it from continuing to grow, so we might go in and stimulate bone to be deposited at the end of the root to save it via a root canal.
If you have any more questions, please feel free to give us a call or come visit our office for a consultation. We’ll be happy to help you and your smile today!