Course Review

Dr Patrick Caldwell’s Advanced Endodontics course was a real paradigm shift for me. In the past, I use to treat all of my teeth with a “one-size-fits-all” system, where the tooth was prepped to the constraints of the file system design. I opted for fast, fewer files approach in preparing all teeth, which often left me dismayed especially after seeing how much coronal dentine is lost.

Pat’s awesome and down to earth teaching style, taught me that we don’t have to adapt the tooth to a particular preparation system, but instead tailor the preparation system(s) to the specific canal we encounter. Conservative endodontics does come at a certain cost – time; it’s not necessarily easy or fast trying to be conservative. You may have to reach for an extra file to complete the prep, use a different irrigation protocol, or a different obturation technique.

Ultimately, it all distils down to how much time you are willing to invest in your patient’s tooth. In my eyes, whatever little extra time/inconvenience that is required to achieve conservativeness is negligible compared to the superior patient outcomes that I will achieve in the long term.

If you are looking for a root canal course that not only imparts you with great hands-on experience but also the most conservative techniques in canal preparations, then you must not miss Pat’s course!