This patient presented with an abscess on a lower molar tooth.  His regular NHS dentist had offered to extract the tooth but gave no options to save it.  The patient was keen to save the tooth so I carried out root canal treatment.  This is the standard treatment to try and save and retain teeth infected with an abscess. 

A tooth with an abscess on it is by definition dead, ie there is no live nerve inside the tooth,  hence in this case, treatment was totally pain free.  However, it is a fiddly job and took two and a half hours of surgery time.  Root canal treatment on back teeth like this cost a few hundred pounds, this is because of the amount of time taken to carry out the procedure, the cost of the thermoplastic filling systems used to effectively fill the roots, the cost of training to remain up to date and in a position to provide this sort of treatment and, that a selection of the expensive instruments used to prepare the root canals for filling have to be disposed of after a single use due to a theoretical CJD risk.

		Four openings to the root canals can be clearly seen.  These canals are about 15mm long and the two front ones had a sharp curve which had to be straightened out through selectively filing away the part of the root canal on the inside of the curve.    This picture also shows how much tooth has to be removed to get access to the root canals of a tooth and this weakens the tooth such that in most cases it is sensible to place a crown after root filling to strengthen the remaining tooth.
		The completed root filling x ray shows the root fillings going close to the end of the roots of the tooth.  Also, on the right hand side you can see where an extra mini root canal going horizontally was also filled.  This can only be done with expensive, types of root filling materials which are melted into place such that they completely fill the irregular shape of the inside of the root canals.