MODEL RELEASED. Dental stitching. Patient's gum being sewn up after specialist root canal dentistry. The dentist has also carried out surgery to add a titanium implant to repair damage to the jaw bone. The damage may result from an infected tooth, or the effects of removing an infected tooth. Root canal dentistry involves drilling, cleaning, disinfecting and filling the root canal of a tooth. The root canal is the area, inside the base of a tooth, that contains the living root. This keeps the tooth in place, so the surgery needs to fix the tooth in place to prevent it falling out.