This is Dr. Antolak from thegentledentist.com in Shelby Township, Michigan. The phone number is (586) 247-3500. And the topic I’m going to bring up today is to extract a tooth or not to extract and that is the question. Any time we have a patient who comes into our office in pain and if it’s developed with within the tooth itself you have a decision to make. And you try to help walk that patient through the process of whether to save the tooth or not to save the tooth.
Sometimes, it possible to save a tooth as long as there’s enough of the natural tooth above the gum-line that it can be built into, that it could be structurally strong enough to save, and then we do what’s called a root canal, and then from the root canal we can actually do a crown to cap the tooth to make it strong again.
Those are pretty simple processes between whether to save it or not. What becomes a little bit more in the gray zone is if the cavity so large that it goes below the gum line and sometimes there’s not enough of that tooth structurally to build anything on that the person can use to bite and chew with. So that usually will walk through a set of x-rays and show our patients and make a decision that’s best for them. Usually financially, short term extraction is going to be less of an investment. It gets you out of pain, it is a valid source of removing the infection.
But that’s short term. Long term, if we can’t save a tooth, it’s much better because that tooth is there for a function. That is, to preserve the space that’s in there, so you can chew your food. It also prevents the other teeth adjacent to it and on top of it from shifting and moving around. That itself is very important because if you can’t chew your food it’s basically a domino effect when things get continually get worse and worse, other times you may extract a tooth is if for example the tooth opposing it, the area is missing calling that functional tooth. At that point in time we may elect to go ahead and remove that tooth even though you could save it with something called a root canal. Let me define what a root canal is. A root canal is when you have an infected tooth that you have a cavity in and that cavity gets into the nerve and that nerve starts to pulsate as the nerve is dying out. That’ll even get so bad when you can get an infection in the base of that nerve of that tooth-this creates a lot of pain.
To treat that, sometimes we’ll put a person on antibiotics, and sometimes we won’t. But we give them adequate anesthesia to numb them up, and make sure they feel comfortable. That’s always priority #1 is being comfortable here. And then, #2, after we get done doing that, we remove the infection in there, and replace that nerve with a rubber material that kind of blocks it off, and just seals it off and helps to heal it up. And then we’ll have to build that up. And because we have to put a hole in the tooth, and, and fill the cavities there, we have to cap it, and it goes around it. So that is going to cost more money initially . But you’ll see long-term, it’ll be much better. So if there is a question, whether you have a toothache, or you had a problem in the past, you may have had some swelling.
You can have a decision to make whether to remove the tooth or to save it. And we will give you our unbiased opinion. I remove a lot of teeth surgically or just what we call a simple extraction. I may also do the root canal so I really don’t have an investment one way or the other; it’s whatever is going to work good for you. If you have an emergency, you can give us a call. Our phone number is 586-247-3500. Our website is at www.thegentledentist.com. Thank you.