Spin Zone > Spin Zone
Keep animals off your table
Rush:
--- Quote from: EppyGA - White Christian Domestic Terrorist on April 24, 2024, 03:17:49 PM ---While we're talking about teeth and dentistry, late last year I went in for my cleaning. They took the traditional bite wing x-rays and then the dentist, new to this practice, came in. She told me I had an infection starting in #2 and needed to go see an Endodontist to get a root canal. I go there, go through all kind of x-rays and the Endodontist comes in to tell me I don't need a root canal, here's a prescription for an antibiotic to stop the infection and your dentist need to pull the tooth. That was what I got for $400+. Says he'll send a report to the dentist office. The tooth has a crown and he says the tooth is split under the crown. I never heard from the dentist, the tooth has never bothered me. I think my cleaning comes up in May. Gonna thank them for costing me $400+.
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Based on my experience last year, I think both of them might be right. You might have a small infection and an antibiotic is only a temporary solution. The infection will recur because the pathway that allowed bacteria in is still there (the crack in the tooth). No they will not do a root canal if the tooth is cracked and yes, you will ultimately need to get it pulled.
This is what I went though last year. Except I had pain in the tooth, and I’d already had a root canal. The dentist took an x-ray and showed me, it is a shadow representing a pocket of infection between the tooth root and the bone. Your dentist should have pointed out something like that to you on the x-ray.
He gave me an antibiotic and sent me to the endodontist to drill through the crown and dig out the old root canal filler and directly inspect the infected pocket, then either redo the root canal or, if the tooth is cracked, send me back to have the tooth pulled. When I went in to the endodontist for that, I told her I was no longer in any pain so didn’t the antibiotic cure me? Now we don’t need to do anything? That’s when she told me, no, it doesn’t really cure it, these things tend to come back.
She drilled through and when she got in she said, yep, there is a pocket of pus. So she cleaned it out and packed it with antibiotic ointment and put a temporary filling in. She told me she did see a crack so she wasn’t going to do another root canal repair, but I’d have to get it pulled. As I recall she charged me exactly $400 also. When I got back to the dentist and he pulled it, he did another thorough clean out before he put back that blood concoction.
Just because the tooth isn’t bothering you doesn’t mean all is well. The infection is eating away at the bone under the tooth. It will eventually start hurting, assuming you did have an infection and the antibiotic didn’t completely cure it, and I suspect that’s the case if your endodontist believed that was the case. I expect when you go back to the dentist they’ll do another x-ray. That should show if the pocket of suspected infection has gone away, stayed the same or gotten bigger. You might have to ask if they even read the report from the endodontist, maybe they expected you to take the initiative and call them for the followup.
If they can show you that shadow on the imaging, might want to go ahead and do something rather than wait til it starts hurting. When mine started hurting it went from zero to real bad pretty quickly.
Rush:
--- Quote from: elwood blues on April 24, 2024, 03:46:25 PM ---Maybe she was not only new to the practice, but new to dentistry and didn't have the experience to know it was not fixable.
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No, if it was like my dentist and endodontist, the dentist has basic x-rays, the endodontist has some sort of microscopic molecular x-ray that can see cracks that don’t show up on regular x-ray. Sounds like the split showed up on his endo’s fancy schmancy x-rays.
elwood blues:
--- Quote from: EppyGA - White Christian Domestic Terrorist on April 24, 2024, 03:17:49 PM ---While we're talking about teeth and dentistry, late last year I went in for my cleaning. They took the traditional bite wing x-rays and then the dentist, new to this practice, came in. She told me I had an infection starting in #2 and needed to go see an Endodontist to get a root canal. I go there, go through all kind of x-rays and the Endodontist comes in to tell me I don't need a root canal, here's a prescription for an antibiotic to stop the infection and your dentist need to pull the tooth. That was what I got for $400+. Says he'll send a report to the dentist office. The tooth has a crown and he says the tooth is split under the crown. I never heard from the dentist, the tooth has never bothered me. I think my cleaning comes up in May. Gonna thank them for costing me $400+.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: elwood blues on April 24, 2024, 03:46:25 PM ---Maybe she was not only new to the practice, but new to dentistry and didn't have the experience to know it was not fixable.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Rush on April 24, 2024, 06:06:53 PM ---No, if it was like my dentist and endodontist, the dentist has basic x-rays, the endodontist has some sort of microscopic molecular x-ray that can see cracks that don’t show up on regular x-ray. Sounds like the split showed up on his endo’s fancy schmancy x-rays.
--- End quote ---
Another possibility, which Rush alluded to, would be that the endodontist has access to a cone beam, which the GP usually does not.
Rush:
--- Quote from: elwood blues on April 24, 2024, 06:26:33 PM ---Another possibility, which Rush alluded to, would be that the endodontist has access to a cone beam, which the GP usually does not.
--- End quote ---
I had to look that up and yes from the pictures that looks like what my endo had.
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