Peter,
I'm gasping at socasusie's statement about all of those root canals.... OMG! I have known dental patients who have had most of their teeth root canaled.... never a healthy picture. I could cry when I hear or see stuff like that because I know what's coming down the road for that person :/
Peter, what provoked you to read that endo book? Is it written by an Endodontist? Is it about performing the actual procedure? Does it go into the pathology of root canaled teeth?
It is not a question about if or when the root canal will "fail". The procedure is flawed due to the anatomy of a tooth since there is no access to the tiny canals. In addition to that anatomical issue, all teeth require blood to be healthy. So even if there was magic to allow access to the tiny canals and clean them out, the lack of blood would still render the tooth sick. Any body part that is deprived of blood eventually becomes gangrenous and if it is not removed that bacteria will spread through the blood stream. The mouth should not be thought of as different than any other area of the body. There are some dentists who have biopsies and cultures done on extracted root canaled teeth to determine the proper antibiotic protocol for that patient. I have worked with dentists who do that and have seen the pathological reports.... most of the results have one or more of the following (this list is limited) : gangrene .... staph infection .... multiple of strains of strep.... remnants of instruments broken in the tooth ... poorly filled canals.... always necrotic nerve tissue.... formocresol/formaldehyde residue and the bone biopsied comes back with ischemia. These are the things found in root canaled teeth.
Some people have retained root canaled teeth for many, many years. Many of them report no dental symptoms. Yet their xrays show a different story. Because people tend to gauge their problem with the discomfort or the pain.... some dentists don't even inform their patients about the findings because they know the patient is not open to hearing about it. So a note of the findings will be written in the chart so that when the patient does call with pain the dr and staff are already aware of the problem. Of course I don't agree with this way of doing things I believe in informing people of the truth. But lines need to be drawn when what we say falls on deaf ears... sometimes we have to just let the chips fall where they may.
Interesting about your mom and focal infections. Here is a link to a dental site where the biological dentist eloquently explains root canals/cavitations/focal infection in words that we all can understand. I feel validated when I read sites like his ..... by the way I do not know this dentist nor do I have any association with this dentist what so ever. We just speak the same language
http://www.drerwin.com/article_06_rootCanals.html
Bryanna
Quote:
Originally Posted by raintaker
socasusie: 21 RCs on 15 teeth?? Good grief. I think I'll invest into intradental toothbrush, water flossed and replace old amalgam fillings with ceramic inlays as soon as $$$ permits it and while I'm still young (I'm 35).
Bryanna:
Yup, I don't know about other people, but I certainly received very little info from all the dentists I've had so far, about anything at all. I usually do my own research online, but only when the need arises, and the need usually needs to stem from chronic, not acute health problem (those we forget quickly and rightly so). One year ago my knowledge about teeth was about 1% of what is it now. I've actually started reading "Clinical Endodontics: A Textbook"...
The situation in upper left quadrant seems bad with two adjacent RC'd teeth, but it's good to get to know the options as other RC'd teech are not adjacent to each other. I recently started using a "private" dentist in addition to "public" one (the one provided as part of public healthcare) and this was the first time I learned about options other than amalgam and composite (white) fillings... the inlays, onlays etc. So now I can actually plan a solution that would include removing a RCd tooth, and change the old fillings on adjacent teeth with inlays = inlay bridge.
I guess the long term viability of RC depends on the magnitude of initial infection, quality of performed procedure and person's immune system? So all RC will "fail" eventually (I now often hear from my mother she has "focal infections" visible on panoramic x-ray according to the dentist - I'd bet many of those teeth were root-canaled...), but not necessarily in 5 or 10 years. Age + general health must be a factor too. 5/6 of my root canals were done without any symptoms other than pulpal pain that wouldn't go away after 2 days (irreversible pulpitis), i.e. no abscess or granuloma. Pain was noticable in 3 of them, and 1 was actually done without any pain whatsoever (dentist saw a cavity on x-ray, tried to fix it, discovered the pulp is already irritated and performed a RC right away - I thought what the hell, but maybe that wasn't such a bad decision after all).
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