there are different types of crowns, but this is basically how it goes: a root canal is done when one of many nerves in your tooth dies, usually from some sort of trauma (getting hit really hard on the tooth or something). This is a problem because, although no nerve means no feeling, teeth become absessed when the nerve dies, meaning the tooth becomes filled with pus. To understand what it's like to have an absessed tooth, put a lit fire cracker between your gums and your lip, as if you were chewing chaw, and then do it non stop all the time.
To get the nerve out, they have to make a rather large hole that goes straight to the inside of the tooth, so large that a regular filling wouldn't be big enough and wouldn't cover it up well enough, and you'd get food stuck in there which would suck.
A crown is basically a fake tooth. When I had my first root canal (that I can remember, cause I can't remember back to when I was two) they shaved the tooth down to a little stub. I had a temp crown on it, but I had to get fitted for a real crown. Basically, it was a fake, metal tooth painted to match the rest of my teeth. (it came out last Thanksgiving, which is funny since it's a fucking PERMANENT crown. The metal on the inside was gold colored
)
They put glue on the crown and glue it to the little stumpy piece of tooth that was left after the root canal. But you don't always need a crown. For one root canal I had on my front tooth (like two years ago about), they left the tooth whole, but drilled a hole in the back of it and filled it tiny metal rods, since it was hollow and all.
A 20 year old not aiming to be a dentist shouldn't know this fucking much about root canals
In the past six months, in addition to this most recent root canal, I've had 9 cavities filled and all four wisdom teeth pulled.
