Lets say that you go into a dentist office.
You have a problem.
The dentist preforms some type of procedure and
tells you that the problem should be fixed.
The problem is not fixed however, and you want to
know what to do next.
First off, dentistry is medicine.
Medicine doesn't always work.
The birth of a baby, sadly, is not always successful.
Fusing a spine doesn't always get rid of the pain.
A total hip replacement doesn't always restore full function.
The same is true in dentistry.
So what then? If the treatment doesn't "work" is a patient then just out of luck?
What is the Doctor's obligation if things still aren't going well for the patient?
Here is a list of what I think a health care provider should do, IF
sufficient time has been given for the procedure to take effect and
the desired results have not been achieved.
#1 Re-Do the procedure.
#2 Offer the services of a specialist, if there is a specialist
that can offer an advanced alternative.
#3 Provide information and/or preform alternative procedures
that could give the same result but in a different manner.
Here is a case that was successful ...........
the second time around.
The tooth in the middle of the shot needed a root canal.
Here is the picture of the finished root canal.
The White line down the middle of the tooth is the filling material.
The filling material is not all the way to the end of the tooth but
is within the 1.5mm margin of error that is allowable for this
type of procedure. "By the book", this should have worked.
It did not however, and the patient was still in a significant
amount of pain.
The option that was then chosen was to Re-do the root canal.
All of the old material was stripped out.
The inside of the tooth was prepared further down the root.
The new filling material is now all the way to the end of the root.
The result is that the patient is now feeling much better.
Now there is a chance that the Re-do wouldn't have worked either.
At that point we would have moved on to the other options.
