How painful is root canal treatment?
By Dr Okim John Paul More by this Author  A root canal procedure sounds scary, but it is typically not a whole lot more different than having a deep filling with todays technology. A patient will experience little to no pain because the dentist will use local anesthesia to numb the tooth and gums. This keeps you comfortable during the procedure. The procedure, usually called okuta emisuwa in Luganda is a dental procedure performed to save a badly decayed tooth which gives serious discomfort to someone in form of sharp pain. The pain usually lasts long and worsens at night that even pain killers might not help at a certain point. This kind of discomfort is because of damage to the dental pulp by infective (bad) bacteria. A tooth consists of:   Enamel  the hard outer coating.  Dentine  a softer material that supports the enamel and forms most of the tooth.  Cementum  a hard material that coats the roots surface.  Dental pulp  the soft tissue at the centre of the tooth that is made up of nerves, connective tissue, and blood vessels that help the tooth grow. Root canal treatment is a procedure which involves the removal of the soft tissue or dental pulp. This is done to a tooth when pain occurs upon biting or chewing, swelling of the gum near the affected tooth, when one has pus oozing from the affected tooth or when the tooth turns darker in colour  Have a dentist review your teeth for a better and excellent mouth. For more information on braces, visit our website at www.ugadent.org  The writer is a Dental implantologist and Publicity Secretary of the UDA.