Sonendo Stock: Dental Technology for Root Canal Therapy

Plenty of people talk about how they hate going to the dentist, but apparently, dentophobia is a real thing. One study found that nearly a quarter of people feared the dentist chair, while dentophobia was the most common among 10 different phobias (defined as excessive fear or anxiety) at 3.7% – even more than fear of spiders or MBAs. So you figure there’s got to be a way for dental technology to help ease those anxieties (except for maybe those who suffer from technophobia) and make a trip to the dentist feel less like a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. 

Perhaps no procedure is more dreaded than a root canal, so you figure that a company that could invent a dental device to make the procedure less painful and more efficient would make a (sugarfree) mint. That’s the value proposition behind Sonendo (SONX) stock.

What is Root Canal Therapy?

A root canal is a last-ditch effort to save a severely decayed tooth after a lifetime of eating too much sugar or shooting too much meth, among other reasons. The conventional approach to root canal therapy relies on manually scraping and removing tooth structure and opening canals inside the tooth in order to remove and irrigate infected tissue. After preparing the site, the dentist (or endodontist, a specialist in torture root canal surgery), fills the root canal with a biocompatible material and plugs the opening with a temporary filling until a crown can be placed on the tooth.