A Closer Look at the Root Canal Process

You’ve been dealing with a painful infection in your tooth, and relief is just one visit away. Each year in the United States, dental professionals perform 15 million root canal procedures, giving millions of people something to really smile about.

Not only will the root canal procedure put a prompt end to your pain, it’s surprisingly quick and easy.

To give you a better idea of what to expect when you’re in our chair, the team here at Hillsdale Dental Care, led by Dr. Roge Jacob  and Dr. Magdalena Azzarelli, outlines a step-by-step look at the root canal procedure below.

Getting you comfortable

When you arrive, we make you comfortable in our chair and administer a local anesthetic to ensure that you won’t feel a thing during your root canal procedure. Feel free to bring some headphones if you’d prefer to listen to music or a podcast to pass the time.

If you have moderate to severe dental anxiety, please talk to us about sedation dentistry, as we want to make sure you’re perfectly comfortable during your time with us.

Cleaning out the root canal infection

Once the treatment area is numb, we place a dental dam in your mouth to isolate your tooth. With the previous X-ray images we took to diagnose your root canal infection to guide us, we use specialized tools to gain access to the roots of your tooth by making a hole in the crown.

When you have a root canal infection, it affects the pulp inside your teeth, which is made up of tissues that contain blood vessels and nerves (which is why the infection can be so painful). When your teeth were in the development phase, this pulp was critical, but now your tooth can get along without these materials.

Once we gain access to the infected pulp, we clean it all out. Then we use an antibacterial rinse to make sure we kill all of the harmful bacteria in the area.

Plugging your root canal

While removing the infected pulp goes a long way toward preventing future infections, we literally seal the deal with gutta-percha. This is a rubber-like substance that we pack into your root canal chamber and seal with an adhesive cement.

Protecting your crown

Since we make a hole in the crown of your tooth to gain access to your root canal, we end the procedure by placing a temporary filling in the hole. In most cases, we want to cover the treated tooth with a dental crown, so we make an impression of your tooth at this time.

At this point, you’re free to go home and resume your normal activities, except you’ll be doing so with a smile because your tooth is no longer throbbing.

When your crown is ready, you return to us for a quick visit so we can cement the crown over your tooth to give it a final layer of protection.

Thanks to your root canal procedure, you not only get much-needed pain relief, but we also preserve your tooth so you can use it long into the future.

If you have any further questions about your upcoming root canal procedure, please don’t hesitate to contact our office in San Jose, California.