Root Canals: Aren't They Really Painful?

Patients often ask me "Aren't Root Canals Painful?".

The discomfort that people typically associate with a root canal is actually the toothache that happened before the root canal, and the root canal itself is not very painful at all, because you're frozen just like you are for any other dental procedure.

Root canals are required because the nerve inside the tooth becomes infected.

It becomes infected for a variety of reasons. Either a large cavity or a filling that was placed very close to the nerve, or trauma to the tooth, like having an accident and knocking your tooth on the steering wheel. Or grinding your tooth to the point where the nerve inside just says, "No More!", and it becomes infected.

The way that we do the root canal is we enter into the tooth and we remove that nerve. We remove the source of infection, and we seal it up. We typically seal the tooth up with a filling, and then we like to put a crown on top of it, because once a root canal is completed, there is no nerve and no blood supply left in the tooth. It becomes brittle and it has a higher chance of fracturing in the future, so it needs to be protected.

To learn more, please go to www.todaydental.ca/root-canals.

Thanks for watching!
Dr. Todd Honcharik | Today Dental Winnipeg | Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

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