RdEoSg said:
Thanks for the info Jaap. Let me ask you this. I have been dealing with this for about 6 months. I went in for two cavities.. How I got 2 cavities when I see my dentist every 4 months and brush every day I don't know but there you are! So she filled them and at the same time noticed a third and I said go ahead and do it too since I was already numbed and all. She did and afterwards one of them still hurt. She assumed the bite was off and adjusted it. I went in every week or so for several months for another bite adjustment because pressure and cold would give me shooting pain. It would only last a few seconds. She did x-rays and didn't see anything. All the while she said it could need a root canal, though she didn't see any thing when she did the fillings. The damage wasn't that deep I guess.
So eventually she decided she was going to redo the filling incase it didn't take and there was a gap or something causing the pain. She went in and redid it about a month ago, but then the same problems, so she again assumed the bite and kept working on that. Then came the intense pain and swelling and all last thursday while she was on vacation so I thought I had a sinus infection since my ear and neck hurt too. I checked online on some sites and saw that those were also symptoms for needing a root canal so I called my oral hygenist. Thing god I have her home number!!! She gave me the number of the people that do the root canals for them and thats who did this one..
Anyways. As it turns out.. from memory I think she was working on tooth 29, and the root canal was on tooth 30. Is it normal for the pain to be on a different tooth? like the nerves were moving it about or something. I told the guy that did the procedure but he said the xrays looked ok for the other tooth. I am concerned though why my dentist never sent me in for a consultation or something. Was she not looking at the Xray correctly maybe? Since she doesn't do them maybe she doesn't know what to look for.. i admit he showed me the thing and I had no idea what he was talking about. he said i wouldn't that it was very subtle, but he knew what to look for.. I just feel like months and months of this should have sent up a flag to my dentist. looking back now it looks obvious, but with mild symptoms not including hot liquids and such, maybe it was easy for her to over look it?
Now I have to go in for a crown i guess but I'm not sure if i should mention my concerns to her.. Its easy to be angry at the messenger you know, but I don't know if there was anything she really could have done.
That are a number of questions, not all of them easy to answer with limited information!
As to the unseen cavities: Well, in theory a dentist using his eyes, x-rays etc should be able to fins virtually all cavities in time. Having said that, it happens to all of us that we see a patient on recall and think to ourselves: "How the **** did I miss that last time!?".
It is a bit like taking a great, carefully considered photograph and on developing finding a tree in the background growing out of your subjects' head. It should not happen, but it does.
As for the pain in a different tooth - yes it can happen. Usually the cause (barring the missed hole described above) is a miniscule stress fracture inside the tooth which cannot be diagnosed in advance. That occurs more often than one would think. To locate the pain in such a case can be extremely difficult for both patient and dentist. I don't think an earlier consultation with the endodontologist would have made much difference. One just needs to be lucky at the right moment to pick it up, especially if the syptoms are mild.
These fractures are also one of the major causes for pain with white fillings. The stuff bonds to the tooth and shrinks on hardening. That can overstress the tooth structure leading to hard to diagnose pain.
And then there is the possibility that the filling is, despite our best efforts, fractionally too high. That can overstress a tooth in another way, again leading to pain. That can cut off the blood supply to the tooth, leading, again, to a dead tooth and a root canal treatment.
So what happened to you cannot be said at a distance. The main thing is that the problem is solved!
🙂
