Root Canal/post/crown concerns...please advise!

[elw322]

I hope to not make this too long....
I just started seeing a new dentist after many years of neglecting to see one. I just had a root canal done to my 3rd from the front tooth. My options were to have a root canal and crown if tooth was salvageable, if not extracting with implant.

So we went with root canal and it was done in two phases, after the first phase a temporary filling was put in and had the sencond phase scheduled for a week later. When I went in last week for the filling stage....toward the end of the process, I noticed with my toungue that my whole tooth was gone! He put in a temporary crown, which is awful!! (After the first phase, I still had my tooth) I asked him why my tooth was removed and he said that he didnt believe it would hold up and that he was afraid it would end up shattering. Now I am going back in a few days for a post and then a week later for a crown.

Now I am SOOO confused.

How am I to get a post and crown with no tooth there??

What is the point of paying for a root canal if the tooth is now gone??

Would it had not made more sense to have it extracted and gone ahead with an implant?

Thanks in advance!!!

 

[Zzzdentist]

Sometimes during (or in between) the root canal process, parts of the tooth can unfortunately break away. Usually it's due to the tooth not being all that strong to begin with, and when you make an access opening that compromises the strength even further, things are going to bust off from time to time.

As long as the break isn't too deep under the gums, it might not affect things that much since in the crown preparation process, that portion may have been removed anyways. It's a little hard to explain without diagrams and models, but imagine a thin, weak portion of tooth on the outside that is just hanging on or has a fracture at it's base. In preparing a tooth for a crown, the outside 3/4 mm to 2 mm of tooth is removed to make the tooth more a tapered shape. In the process that portion of tooth might actually be adjusted down to leave not much of it at all so really it being there or not hasn't changed the final outcome.

As long as the core is rebuilt and retentive enough to support the new crown, things should be fine. The new crown will replace what is missing to produce more of an ideal shape. These are custom made just for you by a skilled technician in a dental laboratory over hours and hours of work so the final crown does tend to be nicer than a temporary one that is completed in 5 minutes.