– Root canals ideally would always be at least two visits, sometimes three visits. What’s involved step-by-step with root canal procedures? Basically, it’s a treatment that’s required if you’ve had a tooth that’s died. Teeth can die for many reasons, either through trauma, previous dental work, sometimes decay it’s quite deep, and so as the nerve in the tooth dies, it becomes necrotic. So it breaks down and produces bacteria. And these bacteria live inside the root canals of the tooth. And that’s what causes the tooth to access. It’s the bacteria in the tooth infecting the bone under the tooth, and that’s how you end up with a dental abscess.

So what’s involved with the root canal procedure is, that you’re going to sort of taking out probably some filling out of the tooth to open up the pulp chamber in the tooth, and locate these root canals. And what we do then is clean them out, we can establish how long the roots are of the tooth, we sort of go down the canals and we clean the canal out so that we’re removing any of the debris, and we’re irrigating at the same time with medicaments to kill off any bacteria. And at that point in time you would then get in and pop some antibiotic paste in the tooth, you’d seal it up, and then at a later date you would go back in again to remove the paste and then seal the root canals often with a material like gutta-percha, which is a very inert rubbery sort of material.

So root canals ideally would always be at least two visits, sometimes three visits, and in certain circumstances, you might be able to do it in a visit. But overall I’d say, at least a two-visit procedure.