Huron Family Dental

Huron Family Dental is a general practice in the plain sense of the phrase — one team covering exams, hygiene, fillings, root canals, crowns, bridges, dentures and extractions for everyone under a single roof, sending work out only for the narrow cases that need a specialist. Dr. Tim Shigapov and Dr. Emily Tichenoff both completed their Doctor of Dental Surgery degrees at the University of Toronto in 2014. Straightforward extractions are done in the chair; deeply impacted wisdom teeth and surgical gum work are the usual reasons a file leaves the practice, and in this part of Ontario that generally means a drive to Kitchener or London.

Root canal treatment is the procedure most people arrive misinformed about, so here is the mechanism. Inside every tooth is a chamber of soft tissue — nerve and blood vessels — that becomes inflamed or infected when decay, a crack or repeated dental work reaches it. Once that tissue dies it does not recover, and the infection travels down the root into the surrounding bone, which is what produces the throbbing and the swelling. Treatment removes the tissue: the tooth is frozen, an opening is made through the biting surface, fine files clean and shape the canals, and the space is disinfected and sealed with a rubber-like material. The relief comes from taking the source out, not from the anaesthetic. A molar loses most of its structural bracing the moment an access hole is cut through the chewing surface, so the root canal is stage one of a two-stage repair and a crown normally follows a few weeks later.

The office sits at 93 St. Vincent Street North, Unit 3, just off the Ontario Street corridor and a few minutes on foot from downtown Stratford, with an elevator for anyone who cannot manage stairs and free WiFi in the waiting area. Weekday hours run 8am to 5pm Monday through Thursday, then Friday mornings only, closing at 1pm. That makes Friday useful for slipping a child's checkup in before the weekend and a poor choice for anything lengthy — book longer procedures early in the week. There is no weekend clinic. One local note worth having: in festival season the parking around Market Square and the Avon fills up with theatre traffic, and the St. Vincent Street end of town stays noticeably easier to get in and out of on a matinee day.