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Key Takeaways:
- Ever wanted to know how to use endo ice in your dental practice? Then you’ve come to the right place! Endo ice is a miracle tool that has so many different uses. In fact, there are certain things you cannot do without it. For example, you can’t make an accurate diagnosis when your patients are in pain without using endo ice.
- Endo ice can also stop canals from bleeding while you’re treating them, which means you don’t have to interrupt or reschedule your treatment over a wet tooth. With endo ice, you can freeze up the blood vessels, stopping the bleeding and allowing you to continue your procedure.
- Finally, endo ice is great for instrumenting hard-to-reach canals. Just spray your heat-treated rotary file with some endo ice, allowing you to bend the file to exactly the shape you need to reach those tough angles.
It amazes me that some dentists don’t have endo ice in their practice.
Quite frankly, I think this is a sin. You simply cannot do dentistry without it—no wait, how dare you do dentistry without it! Endo ice is an absolute necessity in proper and responsible dentistry, and by the time you’re done reading, you’ll have no choice but to agree with me.
If you can’t tell, I’m in my bold era, so let’s just get right into it: Here are three uses for endo ice that are not only useful but essential to every dental practice.
Tip #1 for How to Use Endo Ice: Diagnosis
Yep, we’re hitting the ground running with this one. I have absolutely no qualms about saying that, without endo ice, you can’t make a diagnosis when your patients are in pain. If that strikes you as a controversial statement, that tells me you’re not doing your cold and percussion tests, and that’s a BIG problem.
Pulpal and periapical diagnosis is what allows us to confirm whether a periapical radiolucency is actually endodontic in origin. You can’t just assume that it is from an x-ray! In fact, doing so can lead to the wrong outcome and be extremely detrimental to both your patient’s well being and your practice.
Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about:
The patient in this case was referred to me for a root canal on these teeth. Here’s the thing though: A root canal would NOT have helped this patient! How did I know? Because I did a cold test and all the teeth in the quadrant felt the cold response. That meant they were vital and that the lesion was not of endodontic origin, so I referred the patient to the oral surgeon for an evaluation and possible biopsy.
THIS is why the pulpal and periapical diagnosis—and the use of endo ice—are so important. Had I skipped my cold test and assumed the lesion on the x-ray was fixable with a root canal, I would have not only put them through an unnecessary procedure, but would have also delayed or even prevented them from getting proper, potentially life-saving treatment.
Endo ice can save lives, guys! Use it!
Tip #2 for How to Use Endo Ice: Stopping Canals From Bleeding
Proper diagnosis isn’t the only thing endo ice is good for. It can also be used to stop canals from bleeding in the middle of your root canal treatment.
If you do enough endo, you know that sometimes your canals can bleed just when you’re getting to obturate. UGH! All you want to do is finish the case, but life simply has other plans.
We all know you should never fill a tooth that’s wet, so when this happens, most people close up the tooth and reschedule to finish the treatment, which is not what you OR the patient want! It’s not productive for you. and no patient wants to have to take time out of their day or off work to come back for the same procedure.
So, what can we do here?
We can whip out our endo ice! You can actually use your endo ice to help you stop that bleeding and get your root canal done in that very visit. How?
- First, irrigate the tooth a bit with some sodium hypochlorite, spray some endo ice on a paper point, and then put the point into the canal.
- Then, do the same for each canal in the tooth. This should really slow the bleeding down.
- If for some reason you still have a little bleeding, you can also just move forward to your cone fit, as the pressure from your gutta-percha will further stop the bleeding. Simply go do a hygiene check or a consult while your assistant takes your x-ray so you can give that pressure from your cones some time to do their magic. By the time you get back, the tooth will be nice and dry and ready to obturate!
Tip #3 for How to Use Endo Ice: Instrumenting Hard-to-Reach Canals
A third reason endo ice is indispensable for your practice is that it can help you instrument hard-to-reach canals.
Do you ever get that patient that just cannot open, and you barely have enough interocclusal distance to get your rotary handpiece in their mouth? Or what about that lower molar MB canal with the funky angle that you just can’t seem to find your way into? Well, endo ice is your answer!
If you’re using a heat-treated rotary file, like a ProTaper Gold, Wave One Gold or Vortex Blue, you can spray it with endo ice, which will allow you to put a nice bend in it so you can make it around that tough angle.
Take a look at this photo here to see what I am talking about:
Extremely simple and highly effective!
Do you see why you need endo ice in your life? I think you should be ordering this stuff in bulk. (You can find that and all my other favorite dental gear here!) Promise me that as soon as you get back to your office, you put a can of endo ice in every operatory. Then, every time you hear the spray of the can, you’ll think of little ol’ me and this blog that (hopefully) changed your life!
– Sonia
