Internal (non-vital) bleaching
With all the ads, most people are familiar with bleaching their teeth to remove stains. You can use a whitening toothpaste, an at-home treatment (please do this with guidance from your dentist), or treatment through your dentist. These are all external treatment options.
“Non-vital bleaching” is another type of bleaching. It’s done internally when the tooth is discolored from the inside. There are different reasons for a tooth to get discolored. A common reason is there was trauma to the tooth and it bled internally. While your tooth does have canals, there are lots of crevasses inside your tooth as well. If the blood supply to your tooth is severed, it can bleed into your tooth and get into all those little crevasses. All the external bleaching in the world won’t fix that. Instead, it needs to be treated internally.
If a tooth does need internal bleaching, it will need to have a root canal treatment (most have already had one). Hence, why it’s called non-vital bleaching. The tooth is no longer alive (or vital).
Typically, we do this when someone has to have a tooth treated or retreated anyway and so we can do the bleaching at the same time. Just as the blood seeped into the crevasses of your tooth, the bleaching has to seep into them as well.
We have blog posts and pages on our website with more about root canal treatment.