Hi Gretchen,

Dentists are taught to "retain" teeth in most circumstances. After all, the more times they fill a tooth... root canal it... and crown it, the more revenue! They only have a brief education on the systemic risks of oral health and they associate infection with periodontal disease, rarely chronically infected teeth. But due to abundance of public information now available on the internet, the old mindset of "retaining sick teeth" is going to be questioned more and more by the patient!

I just want to warn you about something that you mentioned.....
If your dentist is pro root canal and she is more disturbed about your bite being off than she is about retaining an infected tooth.... she may be a bit careless when preparing your teeth for crowns. What I mean by that is if she has a nonchalant attitude regarding root canals, then she isn't going to be too concerned about over prepping the tooth, because she will just root canal it if she goes too far. Therefore, it is imperative to make your concerns very clear to her, that you do not want any more root canals. It doesn't matter what she personally feels about that.... it is your mouth and you make the final decision.

Hopefully everything will go okay and you won't have to be concerned about dealing with any of that!

Keep us posted!
Bryanna