I have just had root canal treatment - with no anaesthetic, and I didn’t feel anything apart from some discomfort. This means that
There is actually no pain connected with the treatment, and all the stories you hear are myths.
I have a very, very good dentist.
I am incredibly brave, and, basically a super hero.
I favour the third option, but suspect it may be one of the others.
Actually, I should add, in the interests of honesty, that the pain I felt before the treatment was excrutiating.
For the most part the lidocaine they use now means you have no pain - the stories about pain are based on very old techniques. Also the tools they use are much better now. In recent years I had 2 root canals and neither one hurt due to lidocaine. I would not want to try one without pain medicine.
( FYI in case you are wondering dentists stopped using novocaine decades ago, they use lidocaine now)
I’ve had a couplefew root canals. Some hurt like a motherfucker, some had no pain at all. The ones that didn’t hurt were because the nerves were already dead. You say you were in a lot of pain before the procedure, but how recently? If it was right before the procedure, the I’ve got nothin’. But if it was even a day or two ago, there’s a pretty good chance that the nerves were shot.
ETA that I assumed that no anaesthetic meant NO anaesthetic. Lidocaine counts. I’ve never been given anything stronger for a root canal.
I’ve had three. The pain was unbelievable, but I have a very sensitive mouth and the usual amounts of novocaine don’t work for me.
Then again, I usually get the dumbass who sticks the needle in and then rather than pulling out and poking elsewhere, twists the needle (destroying tissue) to get a different spot. And then there’s the manhandling of facial tissue to get at the tooth.
The pain was there immediately before the treatment.
He asked if I wanted an anaesthetic, and I said, ‘Do you think I should have one?’, and he sort of shrugged (in a very cool way; he’s Greek, and Mrs Nine thinks he’s drop dead gorgeous). So I didn’t. Honestly, the pain was so bad, I didn’t think it could get worse. And it didn’t.
I’m curling up in a ball and whimpering at the idea of a root canal with no anesthetic. You’re not human.
Then again, my first root canal was done with inadequate pain relief. Hell, when the endodontist did the first novocaine shot, it was so painful I was nearly hysterical from that. He kept having to give me more novo, and still I kept jumping in pain during the procedure (this is apparently a Very Bad Idea).
The next root canal, I had switched regular dentists to someone who was MUCH better at dealing with pain (combination of Halcion, nitrous, and novocaine), and went to a different endodontist who also offered nitrous (the first one didn’t). That was sort of funny - the endodontist didn’t usually prescribe a pill to go along with the nitrous, and wasn’t even sure of the dosage (I had a spare tablet from the dentist so it wasn’t an issue). He said most people didn’t need the extra pharmaceuticals. I assured him that really, he didn’t want me sober, his job would be a LOT easier if I was looped to the gills.
Re the nerve being dead - well, that might have helped but the tissues around the tooth sure aren’t dead (I hope!!) and those are gonna be pretty sore from all the jostling.
Same here. My last root canal, after I’d already had five or six shots, the dentist wound up injecting the lidocaine right into the nerve. That helped.
I wish I could have done without it. There was nothing wrong with the nerve, no infection or anything, but apparently they couldn’t prepare the tooth for a crown without exposing the nerve, and I guess that’s a bad thing in the long run.
One problem is that lidocaine may not work well or at all if you still have an infection.
In my case my dentist gave me antibiotics which I took for a few days before the root canal. That got rid of my pain before the treatment. The reason for a root canal is that antibiotics don’t work in the long run , the infection will return.
Been there, done that. And I’m British which, given the way most Americans mock our level of dental care, may make it sound even more scary.
I needed some seriously ‘deep’ work and my dentist at the time simply didn’t bother much with anaesthetic, for reasons best known to himself. There were isolated moments of pain when I could have screamed a swear-word-shaped hole through a wall (but didn’t), but for the rest of the time it just varied from ‘this isn’t so bad’ to ‘ouch, careful!’.
I also trained the conscious me to scurry away into my feet, where nothing bad was happening and it was all very peaceful, and from where I could be vaguely aware that there was some guy at the other end (six feet away) gouging around inside the head part, without paying too much attention to what he was doing.
The thing is, it’s no-one’s first choice as a way of passing the time, but it’s more survivable than we tend to think.
And let’s not forget that some of this is culturally determined. We just think it’s normal to have anaesthetic for any kind of potentiually painful treatment, but this is not the same all over the world. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, visits to the dentist hardly ever involved anaesthetic, no matter what. It just wasn’t the done thing, and people didn’t expect any different. Or so I was told.
All of this work was done on the NHS, at a total cost of £46.50. The work was done immediately.
The only downside was that I really don’t like the ‘waterboarding’ position that I was placed in: head below feet. I’ve been tipping further and further back all my life. When I was young, I was placed in a sitting position; a few years ago it had moved to a head marginally above feet position. At this rate, it’ll soon be a vertically head down position.
There is no way anyone could have had root canal on a live nerve without a pain killer. I’ve had 2 of them with different methods of deadening the pain. One of them involved deadening the nerve as the doctor progressively removed the root. I didn’t understand the literalness of the instructions. I was told if I felt anything to raise my hand. The difference between anything, and mind numbing pain was 2 seconds of digging at the nerve. I knocked the instruments across the room out of instinct. The pain made me seriously light headed as if I had been hit with a hammer. It was that bad. I will never allow this technique to be used on me again. If it takes 12 shots of novocaine then line em up with a chaser of Sodium Pentothal.
When I got one, they shot my up with novocaine (or whatever), didn’t really wait for it to kick in, then started drilling. It took all the effort I could muster to not jump out of the chair and run away for about 10 seconds, then the painkiller kicked in, and it was fine.
I wasn’t in pain before I got there, though, and I know the root wasn’t dead because that was why I was there (the root was bizarrely growing, according to the surgeon). So maybe that’s the difference.
20 years ago root canals were done more by hand. Now dentists use special drills so they go much faster. They still use some hand files but only for a small part of the work.
This happened with my first root canal too. The dentist who did it was terrible. She decided the novocaine was taking too long for her taste, since she was “on a schedule here”. So instead of waiting for it to work, she just gave me more. Twice. I don’t think it worked any faster, but I was numb forfuckingever. She spent the whole procedure complaining that I was taking up too much of her time.
Then she charged me $300 more than she’d originally quoted, which at the time (over 20 years ago) was a metric assload of money, to me. I just walked out. Never did pay her. I wish I could remember her name, since a public service announcement is in order if she’s still practicing.
I couldn’t see what was happening, and I wasn’t in a position to ask, but I’m pretty sure that he was filing. He only used a drill, once, very briefly.
Maybe some dentists still use files but my regular dentist and the endodontist both used drills for most of the work.
The dentist did not numb you at all? You must indeed be a superhero. I’ve had more than a dozen root canals, and can’t imagine this without novocaine/lidocaine. And I’m no wimp, I’m a natural childbirther, I am.
i think that when they remove the nerve they use a circular rasp, especially needed when the root is curved. the length of the root is much longer than a drill bit.
This video shows a root canal, he uses a drill and files.
Despite not suffering much, I am not going to watch that. No way.