The ‘Nerve’
The ‘nerve’ in your tooth, is referred to by dentists as the dental pulp. The reason is that this tissue is much  more complex than a just a nerve. The pulp is the remnant of the  organ from which the dentine of your tooth was created. Dentine makes up most of the root and crown structure of your tooth and at a microscopic level contains a mass of tubules and accessory canals which themselves contain living cells. Anyone who has had a filling where the tooth was not numb can attest that dentine is sensitive to cold water, drying, and pressure, thus illustrating that dentine is not an inert container for the pulp but a living extension of it. The dental pulp retains the capability to repair dentine, with specialised cells laying down more’ secondary’ dentine under  the damaged area. Tooth decay can overwhelm  the tooths ability to repair itself, leading to infection and toothache.

A Root Filling
Where the dental pulp is irreversibly damaged by decay, infection will inevitably follow. The resulting infection will eventually reach the tip of the root creating a periapical abscess. During the course of this process, severe pain in the tooth, acute tenderness of the tooth and swelling of the face in the area of the tooth can all result.

If you want to stop this process and avoid an extraction, a root canal filling is your option of choice. Needless to say prevention of this condition [see ‘TREATMENT BY THE HYGIENIST’]  is much the better way to go.

A root canal filling involves the removal of the infected nerve and its’ replacement with an inert material. At Avenue Dental we have invested in the latest endodontic systems and will select the one best suited to your situation. We will utilize an electronic apex finder to locate the entry point of the neural-vascular bundle into the root or roots of your tooth. A further advance is the use of highly efficient rotary NiTi files to clean and shape the narrow canals commonly found in your back teeth. The canal will then be sealed to prevent reinfection of the space that cleaning has created. The care and attention to detail that we give to root canal work is for very good reasons.

Issues Regarding Root Canal Fillings

Root canal treatment is painful
A survey quoted on the American Association of Endodontists [AAE] website states that
patients who have experienced root canal treatment are six times more likely to describe it as "painless" than patients who have not had root canal treatment.

This result tends to indicate an urban myth at work regarding pain and this procedure. At Avenue Dental, we have found people are far more likely to complain of boredom than pain when it comes to Root canal filling appointments.

Root canal fillings as a cause of systemic illness
Current evidence is that root canal fillings do not lead to medical issues elsewhere in the body. The evidence putting the contrary view generally references Dr Weston Price and the work he carried out with Rabbits in the 1920’s. His procedure was to implant an extracted root filled tooth under the skin of a rabbit which then became ill and subsequently died of the disease affecting the human donor of the tooth. Given the bacterial flora on the average extracted tooth, root filled or not, I think any human being may have trouble avoiding the same fate as the rabbit under similar circumstances. In any case, using the more rigorous methods of current research techniques, efforts  to reproduce his results have been unsuccessful.
     If one part of our body becomes infected, preventing a general infection is the job of the immune system. Controlling bacteria in a tooth would be a tiny job compared to the task of preventing the constant assault the body experiences via the digestive tract or the lungs.
It is a well known cliché that there are exceptions to every rule. The American Association of Endodontists maintains that, The presence of bacteria in teeth… has been an accepted fact for many years. But the presence of bacteria does not  constitute ‘infection’ and is not necessarily a threat to a persons health.
[our emphasis]
This statement is not clear cut, and leaves open the possibility that these bacteria could ‘constitute a threat to a persons health.’ We have already discussed the micro structure of dentine, [ see ‘The Nerve’], and we know bacteria can colonise this structure. We do not discount the fact that some patients, in numbers that may not be significant from a research point of view,  may have the combination of a virulent bug and a weak immune system, such that systemic health problems occur. Therefore we are not dismissive of  patients  presenting with symptoms suggestive of this scenario.

Human Variant Creutzfeldt - Jackob Disease  [CJD]
Once more on the fringes of medical science, along with the issue above, we find CJD. This is not a disease caused by  the usual vector of virus or bacterium, but by a scrap of protein called a ‘prion’. Prions are not destroyed by our normal sterilisation cycle involving the processing of our instruments and materials through a chamber containing  high pressure, high temperature steam. In hospital operating theatres when CJD suffers are treated, there is therefore a discarding of equipment that would normally be recycled through the process of sterilisation. Endodontic instruments have been implicated by some authorities as possible carriers of CJD, and it is the policy of Avenue Dental to discard endodontic files after use with any  individual patient.