Root Canal Treatment San Diego

Sometimes, if it is caught early enough. When decay is close to the nerve but has not entered it, a protective liner placed under a filling can occasionally let the nerve settle and recover. Once bacteria are inside the pulp, though, that tissue does not heal on its own, and the choice narrows to root canal treatment or extraction. Antibiotics can quiet an infection temporarily but do not reach inside the tooth, which is why pain often returns once the course finishes. Waiting rarely improves the options.

Most take about 60 to 90 minutes. A front tooth with a single canal is at the shorter end; a molar with three or four curved canals sits at the longer end, and occasionally is split across two visits. The bulk of that time is the careful part — cleaning and shaping each canal and sealing it properly — not the numbing or the drilling. Plan for a normal afternoon afterward. Most people go back to work; the tooth feels tender to bite on for a few days, not disabling.

Almost never, if the tooth is restorable. Extraction is quicker and cheaper on the day, but it starts a chain: the bone in the gap begins to shrink, neighbouring teeth drift, and replacing the tooth properly with an implant or a bridge costs considerably more than the root canal and crown would have. A treated natural tooth kept in place also preserves the ligament and bone around it, which no replacement fully reproduces. Where a tooth is cracked below the gumline or has too little structure left to rebuild, extraction genuinely is the better call — and we will tell you when that is the case.

It can, though it is uncommon. Success rates sit around 90 to 95%. Reinfection usually happens for one of three reasons: a canal that was unusually narrow or curved was not fully cleaned, the crown or filling on top leaked and let bacteria back in, or the tooth cracked later. That last one is why we push for a crown after treatment on back teeth — a root-treated molar without full coverage is markedly more likely to fracture. If a treated tooth becomes sore again years later, it is usually retreatable rather than lost.