Pain after root canal? Still having pain after your root canal?

Pain after root canal procedure is normal. The amount of pain and how long it last for varies from person to person and on several other factors.

What are the main causes for pain after root canal is done?

The primary reason someone will feel pain after a root canal is that the ligament and bone around the tooth root itself is still inflamed. This inflammation is from both whatever was the cause of your root canal and the procedure itself. If you have a root canal done you either have infection and inflammation in the bone and ligament around the tooth or you have inflammation in those area because the nerve is starting to die.

The other reasons that you may feel pain after a root canal is because root canals can never be done 100% perfectly. Even our best technology, like Gentle Wave can not complete get every area of the internal anatomy sterile or even disinfected.

My root canal hurts when I push from the side

Occasionally we will have patients tell us that when they push the tooth with their finger in a certain way that they still feel pain. We don’t have a great answer for that other than to tell patients not to press on their tooth with their finger in that manner. This happens about once every other year or so it is perplexing. We have patients every now and then that state this but they often have other unusual neurological symptoms after the root canal. This leads us to believe some of these pain symptoms are some sort of neuralgia, where the pain is processing a touch sensation as pain. Other reasons we can think of is fracture or persistent minor infection or inflammation from some sort of missed anatomy. Perhaps time will tell what it is with these rare cases.

Research in regards to pain from root canals

One of the bet predictors of pain after a root canal is what the pain level is before the root canal. If someone has a lot of pain before they will have pain after the root canal. Things that dentists can do to decrease or increase the pain levels are mostly not completely under our control. One thing that does increase the pain level after a root canal is increasing the foraminal opening. The benefit of this is it will improve disinfection of the apical are when bacteria is often abundant. Some research shows no increases in pain and others find that it does increase the pain level. Portela JOE 2021