Despite what many may think, endodontics can play a vital part in aesthetic and restorative treatment plans. Combining endodontics with other fields of dentistry can be a missing link for many dentists working within an interdisciplinary treatment plan, often because while the removal of the disease is essential for healthy teeth, working with multiple aspects of tooth care can create a more comprehensive experience. Dentists who often focus on their field of expertise can often forget that aesthetics and restorative treatment matter just as much as treating the core root of the problem, but the potential to expand our field of work to meet our patient’s needs can be a truly engaging and eye-opening experience.
How Interdisciplinary Endodontics Works
Patients experiencing tooth problems come to us for our expertise and advice. When working within their needs, there is a default approach that, while it is the safest and easiest to perform, doesn’t always allow for the expansion for treating problematic teeth with the patient in mind. For example, a patient experiencing percussion along the anterior tooth area, the wherein previous treatment they replaced the tooth with an implant. However, over time they experienced blackening along the tooth gingiva. The appropriate reaction towards this scenario is to replace the affected tooth with a new crown and clean the internal root system. Considering this scenario from a structural and aesthetic perspective, the potential for scarring along the gingiva area could affect the patient’s social outlook. Thus, using nonsurgical approaches, including bleaching the gingiva area, crown, and post replacement, can also be achieved with aesthetics in mind.
Today, the art of saving compromised teeth needs interdisciplinary approaches, and those approaches can be individualized towards the patient’s experience, as the same treatment used above may not be applicable to the next patient with a similar problem. Implants, for instance, are becoming highly mainstream due to their longevity and stability, but each implant restoration may also come with its own problems if you consider the patient’s personal oral health within that scenario.
In these scenarios, it’s important to ask long-term questions regarding the patient’s treatment and its outcomes. To expand on this, we can look at and explore:
- What are the goals and aspirations of the patient? – Understanding what the patient desires from their outcomes can influence your procedures and techniques and can help guide dentists in their decision process while still applying safe and effective treatments.
- What’s the biologic stance for their condition? – The biologic stance looks at the condition through its pathology and attempts to understand its cause. It’s about understanding the condition from a scientific and clinical perspective and narrowing down the most effective treatment.
- What would I do if it were me? – This is where adjustments to treatments should be made based on the dentist’s experience, understanding of the patient’s needs, and clinical approaches to common dental problems occur. In this regard, it’s the aesthetic appeal, the structural integrity of the patient’s overall health, and their tooth condition, and treat it according to the dentist’s judgment and application of different disciplines.
What Disciplines Work Within Endodontics?
Arguably, any field of dentistry can work within endodontics. However, if you take in the biologic, structural, and aesthetic considerations of any patient, certain techniques from a cosmetic dentist may work with some patients, while an orthodontic approach may work with others. By looking at the patient’s history, their current circumstances, and their desired outcomes, interdisciplinary approaches can be applied in numerous ways and benefit the patient overall, including:
- Restorative Care: Restorative dentistry often merges with endodontics procedures because of how compatible both of these fields are when faced with oral complications. In removing and replacing endodontically diseased teeth, restorative measures such as implants, crowns, bridges, and even veneers present a high amount of compatibility with surgical and nonsurgical procedures. In this regard, restorative dentistry makes up a significant portion of dentistry as a concept.
- Periodontics Care: Periodontal care, which includes gum grafting, scaling and root planning, crown lengthening procedures, and laser treatments, also has compatibility with endodontics due to its intricate connection with the tooth structure. If considered, the endodontic system of roots and channels often presents a relationship with the blood vessels, sinuses, and other tissues that can be adjusted and improved upon with treatment.
- Orthodontics Care: Tooth alignment and correction is often the primary focus in orthodontics, typically working with nonsurgical procedures such as braces and Invisalign, but in the place of those who experienced traumatic accidents that affected the sinus tracts, orthodontic treatment can be used to align and correct the tooth’s gingival levels and help correct endodontic issues presiding through orthodontic means, such as forced eruptions to restore the gum and tooth shape.
- Prosthodontic Care: Similarly, the use of prosthetics in prosthodontics can also be applied in an endodontic setting. Maxillofacial prosthetics are often used to rehabilitate patients with defects of the head and neck region, including TMJ disorder management and sleep apnea treatments. Patients often experiencing endodontic issues can often stem from areas of the neck and head areas that can affect endodontic treatment, and using treatments from this specialty can potentially create more long-term results.
What Can Endodontists Do With An Interdisciplinary Approach?
With the field of endodontics ever-expanding, finding approaches that work for patients often comes with unique challenges, but those challenges can be faced with an interdisciplinary approach. Having an interdisciplinary approach can provide us with multiple perspectives about not only the success of treatment but the long-term complications of that treatment and what they mean for the patient as a whole. Overall, interdisciplinary approaches to dentistry provide more value and meaning to practices and can give endodontists an advantage point that ultimately helps more patients with better quality care. While endodontically diseased teeth can be treated solely through a one-sided approach, interdisciplinary approaches can potentially represent the missing link between what success and failure truly look like when creating treatment plans for patients.
