Should you be scared of a root canal?

Well, I guess the number one fear and the one word that nobody wants to hear is the root canal. So can you tell me a little bit about that? Sure. There are a couple of situations when a root canal comes up. Surprisingly, the most frequent situation when a patient needs a root canal is when the tooth does not hurt. When this happens, what has typically been done to the tooth is there is an old filling. Let's say there's an old filling there, the tooth has sustained some damage, whether it's new decay on the old filling or it is a crack or something like that, and now we need to work on the tooth. When there's a big filling and it's close to the nerve, which is inside that tooth, okay, it snakes right down the middle of the tooth. If there's an old filling here and the nerve right here, and I have to get in there, and then there's some decay sitting here, I'm going to have to go in there and do a root canal. So what is a root canal? A root canal is when I remove the nerve, like taking the wick out of a candle, and then I fill it back up with a sealer or cement that keeps bacteria from getting back in, okay? Is it painful? It sounds like it hurts. No. So there are some rare occurrences where a patient does feel pain with getting a root canal. I can't sit here and lie and say there are no circumstances. But that circumstance has to do with the tooth being overwhelmed with infection. So those patients tend to come in and they're holding their face, and they've been up all night for two nights in a row. But most of the time a root canal is easily handled without any pain, and a lot of patients go to sleep. So you're in there doing this tedious work that the dentist is doing and the patient is fast asleep, because they're just like, "I'm not feeling anything." The nerve is out of the tooth, it's been properly numbed. So it's not a big deal in 99% of root canals that I do. So if I have a patient that has severe pain, that's come in with severe pain, one of the things we may look at is doing something like antibiotics to get everything to calm down just a little bit to take the edge off so we can work around the tooth. But when a patient comes in for a root canal, what we'll do is the same thing as like a crown. So there's essentially no difference in the way I'm going to numb the mouth or the way we're going to treat the case, there's nothing extra, okay? Even if I was doing a filling, say I was doing a filling on a back tooth, I'm going to do the exact same numbing procedure, okay? We're going to place topical jelly, that topical jelly will take the top off of a place doing a needle, and we will have to do that, we'll anesthetize the patient. It's an unfortunate thing, but that helps us do dentistry. So they'll get numb, and again I'll wait five minutes or so for them to get numb, for them to become profound, we'll test the tooth, kind of blow some air on it, or blow some cold water on it, and if the patient's still feeling sensitivity we place some more anesthetic until we're comfortable. Here we do a crown prep first, we don't like to have the patient walking around with a tooth that could potentially break, so we do a crown prep, and then we'll do digital scanning and send it out, all that kind of thing, and then we'll start with our root canal. The root canal, as I said, is just taking the wick out of a candle, so once I open up the tooth it's pain-free, I take the nerve out, and then I'm just going to put some cleaning material, I'm just cleaning in there, it's like cleaning pots and pans. I have small tools to get in there and clean. Then once everything's disinfected, we fill it up with cement, and that's it. Yes. So then after you get a root canal it is typical that you might have a little bit of soreness, because was working on you, it was a lot of work that the patient had, and that can be treated with some Tylenol, we're not talking about anything crazy. That's maybe a 12-hour thing. It's not severe pain afterward. Mainly when you do a root canal, the biggest thing is, again, coming back to this idea of a temporary crown on a tooth. So we don't want them to floss, we don't want them to have sticky food, because the temp will then come off. If they have this occurrence where the temp comes off, we want them to come back in as soon as possible. I'm joking, I'm joking. Well, I know you mentioned a root canal, so are there symptoms to know, like what happened, how do I know I need a root canal before I come to a dentist?