Root Canal Treatment vs Tooth Extraction

- Root canal, you can save the tooth and you can keep the tooth there and know it's got a realistic chance of long-term survival. So talking about removing teeth, or doing RCT. There are a few factors involved in that, it might depend on where the tooth is and how important you feel it is to yourself to do it. Also, it gets down to the reason why the tooth has died, now if there is some sort of crack running through the tooth, you'd always be concerned that in the future the tooth may split, which would require extraction anyway.

So you sort of have to assess it initially whether you feel the tooth is appropriate for a root canal. And then once you decide if it is appropriate for root canal, it is then whether it's a procedure that's going to be easy to perform and it's the cost-effectiveness of that procedure as well, so if you look at the cost of the root canal you can save the tooth and you can keep the tooth there and know that it's got a realistic chance of long term survival.

Well, it's probably a factor in doing it if you're worried about the longevity or the prognosis of the tooth after the treatment, well maybe that's a consideration for extraction. And then possibly it might open up whether you feel you need an implant or some sort of denture to replace the tooth.