Sometimes there may be dead or dying tissue in the canal that holds the roots of the teeth which can cause an abscess. While this is sometimes painless it can be a painful experience for the patient. A solution is making an opening into the canal that is in the roots and then removing the diseased tissue from the tooth all the way to the tip of the root and cleaning, shaping, and disinfecting the inside of the canal and then sealing with a plastic material and cement so that bacteria can’t get from the bloodstream back into that space again. In the canal, when it gets infected, the first thing that happens is an increase in blood flow, which causes swelling. The swelling cuts off the blood supply and then the blood can’t fight the bacteria. This causes dead and diseased tissue which becomes a continuous source of food for the bacteria. They grow and then an abscess occurs when the bacteria start getting out to the end of the root and that is when a patient will experience a throbbing pain.
To learn more about other symptoms and causes of root canals visit our website and watch this video.
A large number of people do not have room for wisdom teeth. This may be the result of an evolutionary change because our diet has changed over thousands of years and we don’t eat as many greens and nuts and our jaws are not as big as they used to be. We are seeing more and more people in the past few generations did not even form some of their wisdom teeth. Those who do have wisdom teeth and don’t have room for them will get impacted teeth. When a tooth becomes impacted it can do damage to the tooth in front of it.
Depending on how it’s sitting in the jaw bone(or what happens in most cases) the wisdom tooth will come part way out of the jaw and then the gum tissue surrounding the enamel covered crown of the tooth can’t adhere to the enamel and a pocket forms. Food can get trapped in the pocket and cause an infection caused periocornitis. This infection causes swelling and pus from around the wisdom tooth that will come and go but become more frequent and severe over time. Quite often it is necessary to remove those wisdom teeth and, in many cases, it is a surgical procedure to extract the tooth.
In our office, we provide IV sedation so that the patient isn’t aware of the treatment while it is going on, and will recover better than with just using a local anesthetic. Taking out wisdom teeth is sometimes an elective thing but it is usually best to do it when the patient is younger before the bone becomes dense. Early extraction also gives less likelihood of the wisdom teeth causing damage to the other teeth, caused by the patient’s bite or resorption of the tooth in front of it. If extraction of wisdom teeth is ignored and it is growing into the molar in front of it, the patient may get almost like decay but its resorption similar to the resorption you get when permanent teeth come under the baby teeth and resorp the roots. Sometimes if you ignore it, you will end up losing multiple teeth: the wisdom tooth and the one in front of it, and then the one above it because it doesn’t have a tooth to function against. For these reasons, extraction of wisdom teeth is an important thing to evaluate at an early stage.
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What is a Root Canal and Why Might you Need One?