This article explains why X-ray is such an important tool for the preservation of good oral health.

You’ve heard it said before: prevention is better than cure! It’s also a whole lot less expensive and, for the most part, completely painless. When it comes to the health of your teeth and gums, what does prevention involve? For one, it requires a meticulous home oral hygiene routine with regular and thorough brushing and flossing. It also requires regular scheduled visits with the Silver Spring dentist and oral hygienist. But one of the most important diagnostic tools needed to prevent severe conditions from claiming the lives of your teeth and the youthful beauty of your smile is X-ray!

About Dental X-Ray and Why it’s so Important

Right now, you may be imagining the dentist zapping tiny disease-causing pathogens in your mouth using some kind of futuristic X-ray gun. Well, the benefits of X-ray are a touch more intellectual than that. X-ray provides dentists with a clear picture of what’s going on underneath the gums. It allows dentists to view the jawbone, the roots of the teeth and the insides of the crowns without actually having to perform complex, invasive and painful surgery to do so. X-ray, in other words, is an indispensible diagnostic tool, without which dentists would be “flying blind.”

Imagine you have a toothache and you go to the Silver Spring dentist for a solution. He investigates the problematic tooth visually, but can’t seem to see anything obvious. The tooth looks fine on the outside and the gums underneath it appear healthy and pink. The dentist then takes an X-ray image of your jaw centered on the tooth that seems to be causing you all that pain and discomfort. Upon reviewing the pictures, the dentist spots the cause of all your trouble: a hairline fracture in the tooth root. Without even having to perform any surgery, the dentist has identified the problem and can now plan a very precise and effective solution.

Cone Beam CT Scans

X-ray saves patients thousands of dollars on needless and dangerous surgery by enabling dentists to identify problems and pinpoint treatment. Over the years, even this technology has been advanced, improved upon and refined. Cone Beam CT scans are an example of the more sophisticated machinery being used in dentist’s offices nowadays. CBCT scans take 3D X-ray images and feeds the data digitally into a computer imaging software program. This software allows dentists to manipulate a 3D view of a patient’s jaw and dentition. Treatment planning is done in detail prior to any surgery and, thanks to this technology, without the patient needing to be in the same room!

A Final Note on X-Ray Technology

Any dentist in Silver Spring MD will tell you that a comprehensive dental exam really isn’t complete without X-ray. Hidden problems, such as fractures, abscesses and endodontic infection can readily be identified and treated before any visible or obvious symptoms have begun to reveal themselves. This prevents the need for costly, invasive restorative procedures further down the line. And as we all know, prevention is better than cure!

This three-part article series takes an in-depth look at root canal therapy: what it is, why it’s necessary and what patients can expect from the procedure.

Little else strikes fear in the heart of the patients quite like the words “root canal” do. This procedure has such a bad reputation that the expression “was more painful than a root canal” has become a popular English language idiom! But, is this procedure deserving of such a reputation? What exactly IS root canal therapy anyway? And what necessitates this procedure?

In this three-part article series, the dentist in Silver Spring MD speaks to us about root canal therapy and why it could be the only thing that stands between you and a gappy smile!

The Anatomy of a Tooth

Technically, a root canal is not actually a procedure… root canal therapy, also referred to as endodontic treatment, is. Root canals are the tiny spaces inside the roots of your teeth. They, together with the pulp chamber (see image below) house the living “guts” of the tooth, including the blood vessels, nerves and connective tissue: collectively referred to as the “pulp”.

Root canal therapy becomes necessary when these delicate tissues become infected. Usually, the body deals quite effectively with diseased tissue by sloughing it off or expelling it in some form or manner. In the case of your teeth, however, this pulp is trapped within the exceptionally hard casing of the tooth. So, when bacteria infiltrate the protective dental enamel and infect the pulp, the health of the entire tooth becomes critically endangered.

There’s simply no way the body can deal effectively with the infection. This leaves the patient with two options: (1) root canal therapy or (2) tooth extraction. Either way, action needs to be taken or else the tooth will decay excruciatingly in the mouth and eventually fall out on its own. Having a decaying tooth in your mouth is not only terribly unpleasant, but it can actually make you sick.

What is Root Canal Therapy?

“Root canal therapy involves the elimination of diseased tissue inside an infected tooth,” explains the dentist in Silver Spring MD. “We do this by drilling a hole in the top of the tooth and removing all of the pulp from the inner tooth chamber and the root canals. Once the insides of the tooth have been thoroughly cleaned and sterilized, we fill it with “gutta percha” – a rubber compound – and a special sealer paste, which will prevent bacteria from getting inside the tooth again. We then cap the tooth, usually with a durable and aesthetic ceramic crown so that the tooth appears as though nothing ever happened to it.”

The procedure is, of course, a little more detailed than this and we shall provide a blow-by-blow account of what goes on during a root canal in part 3 of this article series.

Stay Tuned for Part 2

Stay tuned for the second installment of this three-part article series on root canal therapy. In our next article, the dentist in Silver Spring MD will provide us with a little more detail on what can cause a patient to require such a procedure in the first place and how we can recognize the various signs and symptoms of an inner tooth infection.