Dentist , what a pain

treecol

So here I am again, simply because another opinion is a great help. Obviously I do realise without being the dentist treating DH and without seeing xrays, an opinion is all I can get here. But just over a week after the 1st stage of root canal where the nerve in the tooth has been removed, he is still in a tremendous amount of pain. He cannot eat on that side, it is sensitive to hit and cold and he is still in constant pain. He has his next appointment tomorrow but the dentail nurse called to check how he was mid week and said after relaying the news to the dentist, said the dentist has said she doesn't know what is causing it and doesn't really have a solution????
Since he's had to eat on the other side only the tooth she filled on that side is niw very painful causing difficulty eating. I have a painful tooth making eating on that side impossible and the same dentist has said that the inlay I have in it looks ok so she's inclined to leave it alone.
With the greatest respect to any dentist here, are we in the hands of someone whose standards of treatment are not good. I really am beginning to wonder now.

McKneff

I am a coward. I would have it out and either get a tooth added to the denture or a completely new denture,.
Job done, no pain...

treecol

Well yes, that may be an option but if the nerve has been removed from the tooth and he still has pain, has she got the wrong tooth? If she removes it, what if the pain continues and it's another tooth, what if she can't identify which tooth it s and ends up taking out tooth after tooth?
My worry is she can't get rid of the pain no matter what she does and with each treatment she keeps saying that it will do the trick and it doesn't. What exactly should one do in circumstances like this?

Toothsmith

This is really difficult, as from the things you write about this dentist from the steps she's taken, and the customer service side, including ringing up midweek to see how things are going, this is obviously a dentist who cares about what she's doing, and is approaching things in a logical order.

Sometimes strange things do happen.

Sometimes pain thresholds are a bit skewed in people in different parts of their bodies - causing minor stimulations to be translated as great pain.

Sometimes there are problems in more than one tooth at a time, and it can take a while to realise what else is going wrong.

What doesn't happen very often is a caring dentist turns out to be crap! But we do all have bad days, or miss something obvious very occasionally.

If I have cases where something extraordinary seems to be happening that I can't figure out, I do have a practice in a nearby town which is a referral practice full of various specialists. As I've referred harder stuff to them for many years now, if I have a patient like your husband, I send them off to let someone there have a look at them and see what they think. As this doesn't happen very often, they will often not charge the patient for this assessment, or do it at a big discount. I have been qualified a fair while now, so have generally seen most 'beartraps' before, so don't need things like this very often at all now, but a couple of times in the last 4 or 5 years, I've been glad of their help.

Maybe your dentist knows a practice like this? It would be better to go and see someone she knows of, and where she can accurately describe what has happened so far to them and then let them take a look, than for you to just randomly pick another dentist to go and see and let them try and work out what has happened.

From how you've described her actions so far, I'm sure she'd be perfectly happy to refer you up to someone for another opinion.

welshdent

I third everything said by TS and brook.

No dentist drills to expose a nerve. All dentists remove decay. IF it happens the decay is close to the nerve then tats where you have to go. It is what it is. The inflammation is ultimately caused by bacteria for the most part.

As for who foots the bill... well the dentist didnt cause the problem. They just tried to treat it. There is not a practicing dentist in the world who has not done a "small" filling which has resulted in the tooth flaring up. I had 2 last week. Prior to that I hadnt had one for 6 months. Its rare but obviously frustrating when it happens.

Regards the pain persisting after - again this can happen, Usually removing the top portion of nerve tissue settles the pain 9 out of 10 times. If it doesnt settle it is not because of incompetence it is because of the quirks of the human body. Why dont every single re set fractured arm heal exactly the same each time? Why do some people have post operative infections but others dont when treated by the same people at the same time for the same thing in the same place?

My advice would be to go back and perhaps the dressing could be re done with a little more cleaning inside. These so called hyperaemic teeth which are exquisitely inflamed and bleeding a lot internally or VERY difficult to manage in the early stages because they are hard to anaesthetise then when you DO manage that, they are hard to find all the important anatomy because the bleeding obscures things.

ALL dentists have these issues. We cant all be incompetent

Newly_retired

I am sure all the advice given is great and I think the second opinion idea is good.
I am just going to report my own experience.i had a filling and was left in pain which became unbearable. I went back to the practice and a different dentist saw me. He removed the filling and put in a temporary dressing. He said a nerve had been exposed and air left in a gap when the filling was put in. After this I changed dentist, as this person had previously extracted the wrong tooth from my husband’s mouth. So I think he was incompetent. Fortunately our new dentist was excellent. Sadly many years later he has just retired so we have had to find another. It seems a bit of a lottery. My new dentist seemed to do a good job on a filling this week, but I have had a series of mouth ulcers ever since.