See What a Root Canal Can Do for You
So, nobody likes root canals. You know, nobody looks forward to going to the dentist and getting a root canal. It’s that dreaded procedure, right? How do we address root canals, and how do we address this particular treatment methodology at Anacapa Dental Art Institute?
First things first, we practice minimally-invasive dentistry so that you are less likely to need a root canal. Now, what does that mean? I’m gonna give you a quick example. Say, for example, a tooth breaks. Conventionally, most dentists would cut the whole tooth down into a tiny little knob and put a crown on top of it. And when you crown a tooth, is there a likelihood long term that you’re gonna need a root canal? Absolutely there is, because the tooth doesn’t like to be ground down into a tiny little knob.
We do things a little bit, actually a lot differently at Anacapa Dental. If a tooth breaks, we replace the missing part only. We practice something called minimally invasive, or the technical term is biomimetic dentistry, where we like to preserve as much of your tooth as possible. When we preserve a lot of your tooth, there’s less of a likelihood of you needing root canal therapy, right?
Now, say, for example, you do need a root canal. Sometimes patients bite into something really hard and the tooth breaks to the point where the nerve is involved. In those cases, we can’t avoid root canal therapy. So, how do we do it differently?
First and foremost, I’m a believer that a specialist should be doing the root canal, right? The specialists for root canals are called endodontists, right? Now, why should a specialist be doing it? One, they can do it quicker. They have much more training. They do it day in and day out, and they can do it much more efficiently.
The second requirement is using a microscope. And our microscopes, they magnify the anatomy by 50X. So imagine you’re seeing something really tiny. Root canals are really tiny, right, in the tooth. So if we magnify it by 50, we can get a much better job done. The more you see, the better you can do things. And our endodontists use microscopes on every single patient so that we can provide the patient with a much more optimal outcome.
The other advantage of a microscope is they can access the tooth minimally invasively. Once again, I keep going back to preserving tooth structure. And when you’re working under really high magnification, we are preserving a lot of the tooth structure, which means that the tooth is stronger long-term. So these are the things that we’d like to do when a root canal treatment is necessary.
