What is a dental dam for?

Isolation: Used for isolating the teeth being worked on. They help control moisture and prevent patient from aspirating foreign objects.

To isolate the teeth: A dental dam is a thin piece of latex or other material used to isolate a tooth or teeth during certain dental procedures.

Prevent contaminatio: A dental dam is used to isolate a particular tooth being worked on and keeps bacteria from other parts of the mouth from contaminating the tooth which is having a procedure done. This usually is done with root canals since you are working inside of a tooth and also with amalgam removal to prevent the chance of mercury particle contamination.

Better isolation : Rubber dam is used to provide the best type of isolation during root canal procedures, the mouth has lots of bacteria and trying to clean and disinfect the bacteria on a particular tooth can prove challenging so to help increase the success rate of root canal treatment, isolating the tooth (rubber dam) is an effective way to do so.