the question probably says it all. I am guessing that before root canals were invented, people somehow managed - probably by pulling the aching tooth? So does this mean that today people with more teeth than money can just opt for pulling the tooth out as well?
i don’t need answer fast, thankfully, but just wondering.
Seems to me pulling the tooth would obviate the need for a root canal. No tooth left to drill the root out of.
Yes, you can always pull a tooth that is badly infect but that really should be a last resort. Even people without money should be able to find a dental school that can treat them cheaply. Having missing teeth really hurts self-esteem and wearing a dental bridge/fake tooth costs more than just getting the root canal.
A root canal is less painful than pulling a tooth and may not be much more costly. I have one that has lasted 50 years and has only recently been giving me trouble (that’s because the dentist could not find the last vestige of a root and it became infected last fall. But pulling it instead is a real folly if you have any other choice.
Did you mean it the other way around?
can most root canals be avoided by pulling the tooth?
Yes. And having to set a broken bone can be avoided by amputating the limb.
Pulling the tooth would avoid ALL root canals. Dentists really try not to pull teeth except as a last resort these days, though. You’d think they would be working a little harder on trying to get dental work out of the dark ages, though.
Fun fact - 5% of all root canals fail anyway. You don’t know until after you’ve had all the fuss and expense if you’re going to be one of the lucky ones, though.
Yes, pulling the tooth avoids the root canal, but missing teeth can lead to other problems, like bone loss in the jaw, shifting of other teeth, and stuff like that. Losing just one tooth probably won’t hurt you, but over time we all have more and more dental issues simply due to wear and tear. Getting an extra 10 or 20 or more years out of a tooth slows down the process of deterioration. Sure, you can replace teeth now, but it’s hella expensive even with just dentures, and even more so for implants.
Sometimes you just can’t save a tooth - my husband had one that failed spectacularly about 10 years after a root canal. The dentist said sorry, just can’t fix this one. We could spend thousands on it, but it’s just not salvageable, it has to go. So he has one missing tooth and, contrary to horror stories amply supplied by family and “friends”, it has not resulted in careening downhill slide for his mouth, but the missing tooth does bother him even though it’s not visible when he talks or smiles.
Better yet - all dentistry can be avoided by a simple decapitation.
Barring vagina dentata, of course.
Tooth pulling is really quick and painless these days. I had a wisdom tooth pulled about 2 months ago, and I was amazed at how fast it was. I turned down Nitrous and told the dentist that numbing injections never work on me. He said that they have a new cocktail that he hasn’t found anyone who it didn’t work on.
Time 0: my ass in chair
Time 10 seconds: the assistant swabs my mouth with numbing stuff.
Time 90 seconds: the Dentist come around and give me maybe 5 injections, and leaves.
Time 5 minutes: Dentist and assistant return. He says “open your mouth”
Time 5 minutes + 5 seconds: Assistant inserts sucky tube into my mouth, Dentist inserts some tiny crowbar-ish device into my mouth.
Time 5 minutes +6 seconds to 5 minutes 26 seconds: My head is wrenched around by the dentist who attacks the tooth with the ferocity of Conan with rabies .(The Cocktail works perfectly, no hint of anything like pain)
Time 5 minutes+ 30 seconds: Assistant pulls out tooth on the end of the sucky tube and shows it to me. Dentist pulls off gloves and tells me I need to show up in a week to see how it heals. Assistant tells me to bite down on gauze, and exchange it for new gauze at 5 and ten minutes,
Time 6 minutes: I hand the chick at the desk my credit card.
Time 6 minutes + 30 seconds I put credit card receipt in pocket and walk out of the dentist office.
Time 20 minutes I throw away last gauze.
Time 6 hours. Numbness has subsided. Still no pain at all.
Can I just say that as someone who is not thrilled by dental procedures and who’s biggest fear is a cracked/chipped/broken tooth, this thread has been quite disturbing. Even more so after I accidentally viewed images of a root canal.
It depends if you have money. In Chicago, which is the third larges metro area in the USA, with nearly 10 million people there is only ONE dental school.
Good luck trying to get in. I recall I went their in November 2007 with a swollen jaw, It was really swollen. They said, the first opening for a root canal was in June of 2008. So I was supposed to wait for over six months with a swollen jaw.
I went to Cook County Hospital and after about 2 weeks I managed to get in and they pulled the tooth. Cook County Hospital won’t fix teeth but they will pull them. And it was horrible. They do a revolving door type of pulling so it will hurt. Cook County Hospital didn’t even have a spit sink. The dentist is just yanking and yanking, the blood goes everywhere. It’s all over your chest. Of course they give you a smock, but still
It’s a shame, that when you’re in that much pain, there’s not much you can do.
I’ve had nine root canals, and they are very good, but there’s no guarantee they’ll work. I shelled out (at the time) $1,000 for each one and two of them failed within six months. So you spend a grand and wind up getting the tooth pulled.
Of course seven of them held up over 10 years. So it really depends.
In my case I was given a choice: have tooth pulled by free dental clinic or come up with $500 (this was 1999 so prices have probably gone up since then) to have a root canal. I did not have $500 or access to a Dental school so I have gap - fortunately it does not show too much.
By the time I was 25 I had had two teeth removed. Quite concerned now, after some of the comments upthread!
The first was a tooth that was giving me persistent problems, it had got infected twice, the second time really painfully so I had it pulled.
The procedure was painless* and I had no problems after that.
For the sake of the OP note that they had to treat the infection before pulling the tooth, because of swelling.
So a couple of years later when a large chunk of one of my molars simply fell off** I decided to have the remainder pulled without even really thinking about it. This time the tooth was quite hard to access so it took ages, but I don’t recall it being painful.
And yes, I’m British. Though I assure you, the rest of my teeth look like this: 
An article I read once about dentistry in the 1800’s mentioned that the dentist had gottens o good at pulling teeth and casting dentures that it was only a matter of time before everyone wanted fake teeth instead.
A root canal done properly doesn’t hurt… much. Depends how hard the dentist truies to make it not hurt.
I had teeth pulled in college. (Kids, brush your teeth all the time!) I was in the same residence with some dentistry students, so they got me into teh dental school. They ahve a corkscrew gizmo that reaches in between the two roots and then you pull; one tooth shattered and then they had to pull the bits out one at a time. Thirty years later it’s not that bad… but root canals are covered 80% by my dental benefit, and bridges 50%.
If you can extend the life of root and avoid a bridge (or need something to anchor that bridge) then why not? Then maybe when you’re 80, like everything else, it will eventually fail. A tooth, real or not, is better than a bridge.
I have no experience with the recent implant technology. I hear it works well - sometimes. It isn’t covered by my dental benefits, though. Hmmm… $100, $500, or $2000 - which is better? Lets go with the root canal.
Mijn and md2000, the two things about implants is that they apparently help prevent the jaw-weakening and tooth shifting that you get with missing teeth and that, over a lifetime, they usually cost less than a bridge. On this basis, I was encouraging my dad to get one. His response was that he was old, so that neither of these factors have much weight. In his case, he may be right, but for others, implants may be a good investment.
This last summer I had a back molar that needed either a root canal or to go, thanks to a badly done crown on it a few years before. I was also uninsured and was turned down by Care Credit.
Out it went. The only way I could have kept it was if a dentist took pity on me and did a root canal for free or something. The actual extraction didn’t hurt at all aside from a twinge or two when he stuck in the local, and I was a little sore and a bit wiped out for a couple of days but otherwise fine.
An implant is currently waaaaaay beyond my means but at least it was the very back one, and I function just fine. I would have liked to have tried to keep it (as long as I had very good drugs during any procedures) but under the circumstances I didn’t really have many options.
This site has interesting information on socket replacement after extraction. (About halfway down the page. ETA: Or just where the link takes you.) There are indeed options to prevent bone loss and having all your teeth cave in like a house of cards. 
I just had a back molar on my lower left side extracted, cost: $60. It was a difficult extraction, the tooth shattered as the dentist tried to pull it out, and it took an hour for them to get all the bits of the tooth and its root out.
The root canal was going to cost me almost $1000 (with insurance), with at least three visits to accomplish this task. The tooth was one of two that I had in my mouth that had a filling, and I stupidly ignored my dentist’s advice to stop chewing ice. Well, I cracked the filled tooth as a result, and now that fucker is outta here, with its exposed nerve endings and everything.
I asked some very pointed questions before settling on extraction because I had heard the myths surrounding tooth movement, etcetera, and she called bullshit on it, and I believed her. Especially given this was ONE tooth in the very back, I had braces to straighten my teeth, etc.
Its fine to get a tooth pulled in lieu of a root canal, depending on your situation. A good dentist will go through your options with you, their costs and potential consequences.
I had to have a tooth removed this summer, after I lost a filling from a piece of bubble gum, and then it got infected.
In this case, I just could not afford a root canal, and the local dental school was all booked up for at least a month – and no, it could not wait to come out. Oh, but I was told, I COULD come in and wait around and see if there was an opening!!! (So, my only option would have been to wait and suffer, and hope it didn’t get worse, or go down to the school, day after day, and wait around for a cancellation.)
That and it STILL wasn’t all that much less than the actual root canal would have been if done by a professional.
Well, I couldn’t wait, so I had it out. (It was a molar all the way in the back, so it’s not like anyone could tell) Besides, the doctor who did it was actually pretty cute. 