What is an Endodontist and where can I find the best one?

by The Review CrewOctober 28, 2012

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Root Canals can be difficult and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen and heard of horror stories in the Chicagoland area. It’s awful. From infections, to several re-treatments there can be a wide array of issues that rear their ugly head when you get the wrong Dentist (who wants to be a weekend warrior Endodontist) or even the wrong Endodontist. A lot of Dentists will tell you that they have had the same training that an Endodontist has and that is true to a certain degree. The thing they left out is that Endodontists go to school another 2 years to specialize in Endodontics. This is where they receive all the advanced training for the difficult cases that can get ugly! In this economy you will find more and more Dentists not willing to refer the work to an Endodontist, they want to keep the fee in-house and that means they are going to take a crack at doing your root canal themselves. It’s a lot like having your General Practitioner remove your appendix. They understand how its done, perhaps they even have some ER experience from back in the day… but that doesn’t mean they should be cutting folks open.

So the trend we are seeing is that your Dentist will try and give you the root canal first. If it’s an easy peasy slam dunk they look great, and they get to make some extra cash. If it isn’t though… you pay the price literally and figuratively. For instance if there is a complication we have found that it is not uncommon for a Dentist to stitch you up, say you are done and wait for you to come back so they can refer you out to a Endontist to clean up their mess. This really stinks because you now have to pay twice for the procedure that would have likely been done the first time, and you have to suffer through all the complications that infection, and having the root in your mouth still causes. The second procedure (“re-treatment”) is usually more invasive so the healing time is longer as well.

The worst part is there are not many Endodontists that will call your Dentist out on it. These types of malpractice cases take a lot of the specialist’s time and costs them a lot of money in missed work. In addition they become blacklisted because Dentists network together, are you really going to call out a Dentist that sends you 20 referals a month? That’s a lot of money. So most Endodontists that see this type of malpractice shake their head and clean up the mess.

An ethical Dentist will refer you to a specialist for your root canal right away and that means you will be seeing an Endodontist. This is the best way to take care of yourself because you will know that the work is being done by someone that has seen everything that can complicate a root canal. We decided to start a list of the best Endodontists. We started in our home area (the Chicagoland area) first. We will be adding to this list as time goes on. This is what we found: