Hi robertw,

I am in the dental field and can offer you information here.

It's simple, the tooth is infected and will continue to be infected irrelevant of how many times you have it root canaled. There are several reasons for this however the easiest to understand is that every tooth has many many hundreds of tiny canals called accessory canals or dentin tubules that contain nerve tissue. These canals are microscopic, very curvy and connect to other tiny canals and vessels. During the rc procedure none of these tiny canals are accessible. Therefore the nerve tissue that resides inside of them cannot be removed and it becomes necrotic and diseased causing the tooth to be chronically infected.

Also the fistula that has formed is from the infection which has proliferated beyond the tooth into the bone or further. The fistula is the end or opening of a burrowed tunnel from the tooth through the bone out through the gum tissue. This burrowed tunnel is called a tract. The bone surrounding this tract is diseased and deteriorated. So now the jaw bone as well as the tooth is infected.

Every dentist is aware of these canals and knows there is no access to them. Patients should be informed of this prior to consenting to the procedure. Root canals are performed to attempt to allow a person to "retain" a diseased tooth for an undetermined amount of time. Root canals as well as apicoectomies cannot anatomically "cure" the disease that resides inside of an infected tooth.

The only attempt at curing the infection is to remove the source of the infection which is the tooth and the diseased bone around the tooth.

I'm sorry if you were not informed of this information prior to consenting to the root canal procedures.