Division Street Dental

"I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it."
-Jonathan Winters

ROOT CANALS:

SUMMARY: Do not bite on your tooth for about three days or maybe as long as a week. It takes time to heal and testing the tooth with soft foods is the easiest way to determine if the tooth is healing normally. You will not feel any sensation to hot or cold, but many people feel discomfort to biting hard or chewing to much on the tooth which has the same effect as biting on it hard. The important things to be aware of:

1. Any swelling that occurs either around the tooth or feeling like there is a sense of pressure or “fullness” deep in the bone area. Call our office.
2. If you close your teeth together without anything in your mouth and the tooth that just had the root canal can be felt and it creates pain to biting, you should call our office as soon as is convenient. This type of pain is usually a result of an increase in the inflammation around the tooth. Inflammation causes the tooth to be pushed out of its bone socket. We can grind a little off the surface of the tooth so the opposing tooth doesn’t touch it. The pain will immediately go away. If the biting pain is very minor, it will usually go away on its own. Ibuprophen helps by reducing both the pain and inflammation. NOTE: the more you bite on a sore tooth, the more it will extrude out of the bone, resulting in more pain. Don’t ignore this; it will not go away on its own.