What is Root Canal Treatment?

It is very common to hear from your dentist that you are in need of root canal treatment or RCT. It has become one of the most routinely done treatment now a days.

Have you wondered that what is this root canal treatment or how it will be done and do you seem clueless about it?
Let’s understand what this root canal treatment is?
Root canal treatment is done to save your natural tooth so that it need not be removed.

Our tooth has two parts: Crown which we see in the oral cavity and root which is embedded inside the bone to support the crown.

Tooth has three layers, first being the enamel that is the protective layer, second dentin and third pulp. Pulp is the heart of your tooth which contains the blood supply and nerve supply to your tooth.

When the decay in tooth is present only in enamel and dentin, we remove the decay and then filling is done in the cavity. But when decay reaches the pulp, then root canal treatment is required.

So what is done in root canal treatment?

It is a three step procedure.
In the first step access is made through enamel and dentin to reach your pulp. The pulp inside the root is known as canals and that is why the name root canal treatment as we are going to clean the pulp in the canals.
Depending on which tooth in the oral cavity the treatment is done, the number of canals vary from one to as high as even six to seven. So your dentist in the first step gets access to all these canals.

The second step is cleaning of the pulp from these canals. Cleaning is done to remove all the infection and bacteria that are present in these canals. All the infection is removed at this stage and if the infection still persists, medicament is placed inside the canal to kill all the microorganisms.

The third step is filling these canals. If your dentist finds it appropriate that your tooth is free of infection, then the treatment is completed in the third step by filling the space that was created by removing the pulp and sealing it tight to prevent reinfection. After that the cavity in the crown is also filled up.

Thus root canal treatment removes the infection from your tooth and also saves the tooth. That is the reason it is most routinely done treatment nowadays so that we can save the natural teeth and not remove it.

Always think of root canal treatment as an option before you decide to extract any tooth
Until the next time