How Dentists Drain an Abscessed Tooth

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. Joe Neely. I practice with the Barton Oaks Dental Group. We're going to talk about, if you can pop an abscessed tooth. If you think of a tooth as being, much like the ball point pen, a hard outer shell, with some contents inside, some tissue, blood vessels and nerves inside. An abscess is merely an infection that's trapped somewhere, so in an abscessed tooth, the infection is trapped inside the hard outer shell of the tooth. It's trapped also by the ligament, that holds the tooth in place, and the bone that surrounds that ligament, and creates the support for the tooth ,so an abscess would be an infection, trapped inside the tooth, inside the ligament, or inside the bone, or all three. You could bore a hole through the gum and bone, into the infected area, and relieve pressure that way. You could bore a hole, or drill a hole through the tooth, into the inner chamber, and create a way for the pressure to be released, and that way, you could physically pop an abscessed tooth."