Symptoms & diagnosis
Saving your natural tooth in Market Harborough
Nothing replaces a natural tooth as well as the tooth itself. Implants and bridges are good solutions when a tooth is truly lost, but a tooth with a healthy root, enough sound structure and no crack is almost always worth keeping. Our work is to find out, honestly, which category your tooth belongs to.
Why keeping the tooth matters
A natural tooth is anchored in the bone by a ligament that lets you feel how hard you are biting and keeps the bone around it healthy. It looks and feels right, it costs less over a lifetime than its replacements, and it needs no surgery to install. A well-treated and well-restored root-canal tooth can serve for decades.
What we assess
- Restorability. Is there enough sound tooth above the gum to hold a crown or filling? Sometimes a small gum procedure or orthodontic movement makes an apparently hopeless tooth restorable.
- Cracks. A crack confined to the crown can be managed; one that runs down the root cannot.
- Bone and gum support. Advanced gum disease around a tooth limits what endodontic treatment can achieve.
- Canal anatomy and previous treatment. Blocked canals, posts and broken instruments are often manageable under the microscope but affect the prognosis.
- Your priorities. How you feel about treatment, the time involved and the alternatives all matter.
Your options, from least to most invasive
- Root canal treatment for a tooth that has not been treated before.
- Retreatment when an earlier root filling has failed.
- Endodontic microsurgery when the root tip cannot be reached through the tooth.
- Extraction and replacement, discussed with your dentist, when the tooth cannot be restored predictably.
An honest second opinion
Many of the teeth we see have been labelled hopeless because they looked difficult rather than because they were. Equally, some teeth really should be removed, and treating them would waste your money and delay a better solution. We give you our genuine assessment in writing, with the likely success of each option, so that the decision is yours and informed. Our guide root canal treatment or extraction sets out the questions we ask.
Working with your dentist
Keeping a tooth is a team effort. We treat the inside of the tooth; your own dentist restores it and looks after it at check-ups. After your appointment we send your dentist a report with X-rays and our recommendations for the final restoration, so nothing falls between the gaps.