STEPS IN ROOT CANAL TREATMENT
The Steps in RCT - Your Bread & Butter in Dentistry - Know it before you start practice
Step.4-CLEANING AND SHAPING THE ROOT CANAL OF THE TOOTH
The next step is to clean and disinfect the inside of the tooth by removing the infected pulp and cleansing the canals.
What is Shaping of the Canals ?
Shaping of the canal refers to the widening of the canal width of the tooth by using instruments in a sequential manner. The idea here is to make adequate space for the instruments to enter the canal and remove the infected pulp. Also the widened canals act as a passage for the irrigation fluids to flush the canals and the pulp chamber.
The dentist needs to do the shaping in a controlled manner. Excess of shaping will lead to excess widening of the canals that will make the tooth structure weak.
Instruments Used For Cleaning And Shaping:
Root Canal Files : are surgical instruments used by dentists when performing root canal treatment. These tools are particularly used to clean and shape the root canal, with the concept being to perform complete chemomechanical debridement of the root canal to the length of the apical foramen.
Files are commonly made from metal; usually stainless steel or nickel titanium alloy. Files may be made from metal blanks that are twisted or machined to produce various sizes and tapers. Typical file lengths are 21mm, 25mm, 31mm. An ISO sizing system is used to describe the tip size of endodontic files. Files are usually colour-coded in an ISO colour system to aid the dentist. Typically steel files have 2% tapers, but in recent years Ni-Ti files with up to 12% tapers have been popularized.
Also widening the canal gives proper access to the dentist to remove the infected pulp tissue. That’s the basic of the root canal procedure. Infected pulp tissue acts as the foci of infection and gradually involves the entire pulp chamber.
Shaping the canal by instruments provides passage for the irrigation solutions like sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) to cleanse the entire pulp chamber by killing the microorganisms by the action of effervescence.
HOW ARE FILES USED ?
- A dentist will work a file up and down, with a twisting motion.
- This action scrubs, scrapes and shaves the sides of the canal, thus cleaning and shaping it.
- Your dentist might use several files of various sizes.
