A dental question......?!
Question: What can the dentist do if you have a scheduled root canal but the tooth is infected. Can he still do the work and will it effect the pain level.
Answers: What can the dentist do if you have a scheduled root canal but the tooth is infected. Can he still do the work and will it effect the pain level.
Anesthesia in a normal acid/base environment likes to seep into nerve fibers slowly, which is why anesthetics take some time to set under normal conditions. In an acid environment, fewer anesthetic molecules convert to a diffusible form. In order to overcome this difficulty, we use a LOT more anesthesia than we do if you are not already in pain when you present for treatment.
On the other hand, some people present with what we call a hot tooth. A hot tooth is one in which the nerve is alive, but badly inflamed. The tooth is generally already very painful, especially to hot or cold stimuli. These are the ones that require multiple shots to get anesthetize. A vast majority of these will numb out with a few carpules of anesthesia administered in the normal way. A few, however, are so inflamed and acidic that the anesthesia cannot diffuse into the nerve fibers well enough to totally destroy the sensations generated by the nerve in the tooth. In these cases, we may resort to intrapulpal anesthesia. In this procedure, we will drill very quickly directly though the top of the tooth into the nerve chamber (a few seconds is generally sufficient time) and deliver a quick squirt of anesthesia directly into the nerve inside the tooth. It's fast, and always effective.
The dentist will usually give you antibiotics to cure the infection before doing the work. I don't think they can work on an infected tooth because the infection would spread and that would be bad (and painful!).
If there is a tooth nerve infection then that's why you are having the root canal. That should be the solution for your tooth nerve infection. After successful treatment your pain should go away. To also help control the infection you should be prescribed an antibiotic regimen.