Jenny,

I replied to your other post in the thread by Lenzi86. Please go to that thread to see my reply.

I just want to add .... all of the dental saga that you have been through, although traumatic.... expensive ... and time consuming with this tooth, is irrelevant for the simple fact that ALL root canaled teeth are chronically infected. I will attach a diagram of the anatomy of a tooth to show you the magnitude of how many microscopic canals each tooth has that are not accessible during any dental treatment or surgery. These canals continue to harbor necrotic infected nerve tissue irrelevant of what is done to the tooth. This means that the infection spreads at a rate unique to each individual. Sometimes it is rapid, other times it is slow. Sometimes something happens like an injury or illness that causes the infection to speed up.

Although it seems like only #9 has a problem, it is both of the root canaled teeth are infected. One may have more obvious symptoms than the other. Removing just #9 may not be advantageous as the other infected tooth may prohibit the healing of that extraction.

Dental xrays are only 2 dimensional and don't always pick up the extent of the pathology related to root canaled teeth. Aside from that, ALL dentists know that root canaled teeth are chronically infected and that the fistulas that form are directly related to that tooth. Sometimes when there are 2 root canaled teeth next to each other, it can be difficult to determine which one of those teeth has the fistula because the fistula does not always form directly over the most infected tooth. It can form near another tooth due to the path the infection has taken in the bone from the infected tooth to the outside of the gum.

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