Welcome to the blog of Dr. Deborah S. Bishop, your dentist in Huntsville!
Actually, Dr. Bishop is a specialty dentist– what’s known as an endodontist, and this means she specializes in treating and relieving the most severe dental pain. In this blog, we’re going to discuss everything she can do to help your smile so you can know exactly where to go when your teeth start giving you trouble.
How We Can Serve Your Smile
An endodontist is a dentist who is specially trained to treat the innermost layer of a tooth. This part of the tooth is actually called the dental pulp, and it contains a number of blood vessels as well as the central nerve of the tooth.
When a cavity is left untreated for a very long time or a tooth becomes damaged in an accident, it’s very common for this portion of the tooth to become infected. Suffice it to say, when this happens, it’s not good news.
Because the infection is literally right on the nerve, as you can imagine, it can be quite painful! We’re talking about a next level toothache here, the kind of thing that makes it hard for you to even think, let alone work, play, or do anything else. While many general dentists might have a general idea (see what we did there?) of how to treat these kinds of issues, you should really trust an endodontist in order to reliably get complete relief. In fact, many of our patients are referred to us by general dentists specifically for this reason.
At our office, we offer a number of services that can help take away even the most severe dental pain:
- Nonsurgical Root Canals: This is the most common way we can treat the damaged dental pulp. Root canals are one of the most misunderstood procedures in all of dentistry as they are often thought of as extremely painful. In actuality, they are one of the best tools we have to relieve dental pain and save teeth that would otherwise need to be extracted. The procedure itself is practically painless; it’s really the infection that causes all the problems! With this treatment, we’ll remove the damaged tissue and therefore your pain so you can get back to your life without constant discomfort.
- Apicoectomies: This could also be called a surgical root canal, and we use this procedure when an infection has extended well beyond the root of the tooth. Once again, the procedure itself is virtually painless and one of the best ways to save your tooth from being removed.
- Dental Injuries: Like we mentioned earlier, sometimes trauma can cause the pulp to be damaged, and in that case, we can provide relief and help restore your tooth at the same time.
- Endodontic Retreatment: While root canals performed by an endodontist have a 95% success rate, those performed by general dentists…do not. This is why after getting a root canal with their general dentist, many patients end up having to come see us to have the procedure redone. In these situations, we work very carefully to find the root cause of the problem so we can make sure we do things the right way.
Have Any Questions?
To sum everything up, our goal here is to alleviate our patients’ dental pain while keeping them as comfortable as possible. We just love seeing the looks on their faces when the pain finally goes away. Dr. Bishop and our team take great pride in the quality of our work here, which is why an entire network of general dentists are willing to refer their patients to us for extra help.
If you have any questions about our practice, or if you have a severe toothache and you want it to go away NOW, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.