Healthy teeth are essential for the health of the body as a whole.
Why treat teeth?
An infected tooth will not heal itself. It needs the attention of a dentist. An untreated tooth is a source of micro-organisms, which can migrate through the circulatory system to all parts of the body and cause a variety of illnesses, the source of which often cannot be identified.
Inside the tooth are blood and lymphatic vessels which nourish it, as well as nerves which give the teeth sensitivity. Deep decay or injury (fracture) of the tooth can lead to infection of the blood vessels and nerves within the tooth. When this happens, entodontic, or root canal treatment is required.
Root canal treatment requires a skilled dentist and often more than one visit.
The procedure for root canal treatment:
- Removing infection from the tooth’s root
- Cleaning and shaping the root canal and inserting medicine
- When all infection has been removed from the tooth and the tooth treated, it is permanently closed with a filling or crown.
Entodontic treatment
In order to preserve teeth which have lost their natural vitality, we perform entodontic treatment.
As with the majority of dental procedures, so with entodontic treatment, detailed preparation and analysis needs to be done before beginning treatment itself.
Key in performing successful root canal treatment is a device called the apex locator, which precisely locates the tip (apex) of the tooth’s root. On its screen the dentist can clearly see how far he is from the apex of the root, which is crucial in treating the canal.
Preparation of the canal is done mechanically at Smile Time, providing patient comfort, speeding up the procedure itself and increasing the success rate of the treatment.
Treating infected canals
The dentists at Smile Time have a special focus on treating infected canals. Treatment is done with solutions which eliminate undesirable bacteria from the canal. The tooth’s root canals can often branch extensively, or be constricted or inaccessible, and then cleaning agents cannot always reach all areas.
In our surgery we perform treatment of root canals using a laser.
The laser light reaches even into the side channels, giving excellent results. A tooth with an infected channel that is treated using laser light has the greatest chance of being successfully treated, and its function will remain unchanged as compared to a completely healthy tooth.
