Tooth x-ray showing dead nerve Credit: Shutterstock

There’s lots of fun things you could be doing this weekend, barring unexpected misfortune—like needing an emergency root canal. It’s arguably the most dreaded dental procedure, but if a promising new type of filling pans out, no one need ever suffer through this often-painful process again.

Perhaps you are one of the fortunate few to whom the concept of a root canal is a mystery. Let me enlighten you. Dentists typically treat cavities by drilling away the decay and plugging the hole with a filling made of gold, porcelain, a composite resin (tooth-colored fillings), or an amalgam of some sort (usually an alloy of mercury, silver, copper, tin and sometimes zinc).

But those fillings can fail, and when that happens, all the soft tissue at the center of the tooth—nerves, blood vessels, that sort of thing—can get infected, and eventually die. And more often than not, the tooth does not go gently into that good night. It may start […]