We hope you will never get an infection in your tooth that means you have to have root canal therapy, but if you do, you can rest assured that at Kings Dental Clinic in Hammersmith, you will be treated with the latest equipment and by a dentist trained specifically in root canal work.

Dr Nadia Tawfiq is our root canal dentist, working in a branch of dentistry known as endodontics, which is concerned with the treatment of the soft pulp within the tooth. The pulp is the very inner part of the tooth and it runs all the way down the tooth from the centre of the crown to the tips of the roots. This is the part of the tooth that has to be removed when it becomes diseased or infected. This can happen if the tooth is decaying, or has cracks in it, or if it gets injured in an accident of some kind.

What is root canal therapy?

Dentists carry out root canal work when the pulp inside the tooth root has become infected or diseased, but the rest of the tooth above the gum line is still healthy. Having root canal therapy allows you to keep your tooth instead of having it extracted and then having to have some kind of false tooth installed.

People tend to think of root canal therapy as a particularly painful treatment, but you need not feel any pain with Dr Tawfiq, who will make sure that you are completed numbed with a local anaesthetic. She will then use the latest rotary files and apex locators to clean the infected pulp from the tooth, all the way down to the tip of the root.

It may take more than one visit to complete the treatment, especially if it is a complex case, working on a tooth with multiple roots. You will be fitted with a temporary crown between appointments.

At the end of treatment, your tooth will be covered with a porcelain crown to protect it and it should then last you a good many more years. We have a 95% success rate to back up this claim.