Root Canal Treatment

What is root canal treatment?

Root canal treatment is a form of treatment based on cleaning and removing the pulp tissue of the tooth that has been damaged in some way, cleaning the inside of the root, removing dead tissues and then filling it with appropriate filling materials.

Patients usually complain of mild or severe pain. Sometimes the picture is accompanied by swelling. If patients ignore mild pain, they may encounter much more intense pain and abscess in the future.

Mostly, when the patient applies to the clinic, they have pain that does not go away even with painkillers. However, when the root canal treatment is started and the nerve of the tooth is removed, the patient's pain passes immediately.

Root Canal Treatment Ankara in Turkey

Root canal treatment is generally considered to be a very painful procedure and patients tend to postpone the treatment. Root canal treatment with innovative modern techniques in our Ankara clinic, root canals are treated comfortably and painlessly in one or two sessions.

Why is root canal treatment performed?

• The most basic reason is that tooth decay reaches the inner surfaces of the tooth, damaging the pulp tissue where the nerves are located,
• In cases where the tooth fracture line is deep,
• In tooth cracks,
• It may also be necessary to perform root canal treatment when excessive sensitivity occurs after cutting teeth for prosthesis.

How is root canal treatment performed?

During root canal treatment, a cavity of sufficient size is opened from the visible part of the tooth in the mouth to reach the pulp tissue. The entire nerve vascular bundle along the root is removed, the inside of the root is cleaned and disinfected, the length of the canal is precisely determined by X-ray and filled with appropriate intracanal filling materials.

Root canal treatment is a painless treatment performed under local anaesthesia (i.e. the simplest numbing method applied from the edge of the tooth to the gum).

How many days does root canal treatment take?

Today, the treatment protocol has become very easy thanks to the devices we use when performing root canal treatment, which we call rotary systems.

If there is no chronic infection in the tooth, the treatment can usually be completed in a single session. Sometimes, in the presence of abscess and infection, the physician may extend the treatment for several sessions by dressing in order to provide the necessary healing and cleaning. Sometimes, due to the morphological structure of the tooth, the canals may be very narrow or extra canals. In these cases, the treatment may not be completed in a single session.

Is there an alternative treatment to root canal treatment?

Root canal treatment is one of the most protective treatments of dentistry. For this reason, it should not be considered as an alternative treatment to extraction and replacement with a bridge or implant for a tooth that is considered to be treated with root canal treatment. Saving our own tooth should always be our priority.

Will there be pain in the tooth with root canal treatment?

If the root canal treatment will be performed in several sessions, the patient may feel pain from time to time until the end of the treatment. These pains are usually mild, more often they are pains that occur when eating when pressure is put on it.

Sometimes, especially in the first 2-3 days after the treatment session, there may be pain that passes with painkillers. After the end of the treatment, most of the patients start to use their teeth without any problems.

If the root canal treatment has been completed under ideal conditions and the patient still feels some pain while using the tooth, there may be several reasons for this. It is acceptable to have some pain in the first days after treatment.

The important thing here is that the pain decreases perceptibly with each passing day, and the pain should disappear within 1 week and 10 days at the latest. If the pain is still not completely relieved despite the reduction, the tooth can be examined in 3 dimensions with more advanced radiographic examinations such as tomography.

If there are conditions such as cracks in the root of the tooth, the presence of extra canals, the pain does not completely disappear even after the treatment. Tomography will allow us to make a clearer diagnosis of these unexpected conditions in the roots of the tooth. In the presence of a crack or extra canal, the physician will perform treatment accordingly.

Can root canal treatment (retreatment) be performed on a tooth that has had root canal treatment?

Retreatment is the name given to the renewal of root canal treatment. If the root canal treatment is not performed in an ideal way, the patient may not feel discomfort at first.

However, in the future, problems such as inability to chew fully and pain will definitely arise. Sometimes there is microbial leakage from inside the tooth and it reaches the root tip through the root and causes infection. In such cases, it is necessary to renew the root canal treatment.

When re-doing the root canal treatment, a protocol very similar to the treatment protocol we applied for the first time is applied. However, it may not always be possible to repeat the root canal treatment successfully due to blockage in the canals, instrument fractures, very large infection area and similar reasons. Then the tooth may need to be extracted.

Does the tooth with root canal treatment break more quickly?

If the tissue loss is too much in the tooth with root canal treatment, the fragility of the tooth may increase with root canal treatment. The important thing here is that if the filling to be made after the root canal treatment is completed will be very large, that is, if the upper structure of the tooth is weak, the tooth is prevented from breaking in the future by placing screws, which we call post, into the canal and by placing a crown (coating) on the upper structure of the tooth.

Will there be a colour change in the root canal treated tooth?

Yes, teeth that have undergone root canal treatment may have visible colour changes in the following years. Unfortunately, sometimes greyish, sometimes yellowish, a colour formation different from the colour of the adjacent tooth is unfortunately observed. If this creates a problem in terms of aesthetics, the problem is solved either by tooth whitening or porcelain ceramic coatings.