Apicoectomy: Do i really need one/what alternative(s) are there

[bearsdaughter]

Hello-a couple of years agom I seem to have had a smallish black space appear near the root of a (root canal treated) front tooth..teeth either side also RCT'd..Dentist suspected low level chronic infection,to be monitored..4 weeks ago,the entire jaw started throbbing,horrendous tooth and gum ache,referred pain into jawjoint,teeth painful to touch,sinus hurting-worse than nervepain when tooth is dying! X ray showed enlarged black space under middle one of three RCT teeth ,even though pain appeared worse in outside tooth,Dentist reckoned infection has turned into cyst..Put me on week's worth of amoxicillin,which failed to stop pain..put me on another week,plus metranidazole in addition to amoxixillin,,this finally,three weeks on.appeared to calm things down..Ideally (in his opinion),he now wants to refer me to a colleague for an 'apicoectomy',the description of which is making me feel sick..I can see that it would be preferrable to him,as he's halfway through making me a partial denture to fill a large gap next to the front teeth -and I guess one of the three would act as an anchor,so he would not have to redesign the denture (or have to add an extra tooth,should the one in question turn out to not be salvagable after all).. Now I am not keen to have tooth taken out-since it's a front tooth,would look horrible,on top of being terrified of procedure( the last few times i had extractions I threw up as found it so traumatising)..neither am I convinced that cutting open my gum,making a hole in bone and then removing infected tissue,along with tip of dead tooth,and then stitching it all up again,is going to be a) successful in getting rid of infection b) any less traumatic..several people have told me if they'd known what was involved beforehand,and that they ended up loosing tooth anyway,they wou;dn't have gone for it..And ,should extraction be really necessary-how the heck do I then get the ensuing gap filled?Implant??on top of potential remaining infection?equally traumatic??new design for new denture?? so many unknowns..any encouraging/success stories with apicoectomy??

 

[Gordon]

Ask for a referral to a specialist endodontist and take it from there. Yes, apicectomies are very successful in many cases, but you want a specialist endodontist to evaluate the existing root treatments first. In many cases redoing the RCT will fix the issue.