An older pediatric dentist taught me that formocresol was not needed in on a pulpotomy on a childs tooth. I have just put ZOE in them for the past 7 years and have had only 1 fail. I am talking about all of them. Just try it and you'll see! Also, when prepping a baby tooth for a SSC, just break the mesial and distal contacts, cut a donut hole in the middle to open the nerve chamber, round the corners of all the top, then use a round #4 or #6 to remove the pulp and slap in your ZOE and push it down with a small wet cotton roll. Then take your pre-crimped crowns (usually a #4) and fill it with cement and cement it on. Immediately wash out the cement w/ water around the crown for easy cleanup and then have the child bite on a cotton roll until it sets up. You can do this in less than 10 minutes. In dental school it would take sometimes up to 1 hr until you got to this point. What a joke!
You share some good tips but I would change your order a little bit. Also, I'm glad you've only had 1 failure but that approach is not supported by the literature and formo is the gold standard.
I would recommend you not do your interproximal slices before opening the chamber. If you do and you can't control heme, you can have a hard time trying to determine if it's from the canal itself or leaking in from the interproximal. Also, by doing the occlusal reduction first, it makes unroofing it MUCH easier from a visibility staindpoint. This is my general sequence:
1. Rubber dam isolation
2. Occlusal reduction with an 8 round high speed (in dental school i was taught to keep anatomy...hogwash! Just flat plane it and leave the buccal cervical bulge)
3. Decay excavation with slow speed
4. Unroof the chamber with a 169. I "pop the top"- start where the pulp exposure is, keep the bur at that exact depth, and cut a circle around the top of the chamber...it will "pop" right off into the high speed evac
5. slow speed with upward motion on pulp stumps to remove tissue, spoon excavate if needed. If you have less experience put the slow speed in reverse for this
6. at this point heme should be controlled. place formo cotton pellot. interproximal slices with a 169, try on your crown (good tip to start with the ssc size 4) Also, if the D is usually 1 size bigger than the E, so if you use an E4 for tooth T for example S is likely a D5. If you did contralateral tooth size is usually the same)
7. remove formo, heme should be controlled. if it is not, it means one of two things: either you didn't sufficiently remove the coronal pulp tissue or it's hyperemic. Remove excess tissue, reapply formo, and this time use hand pressure with it. If it still bleeds it's hyperemic and needs ext/space maintenance
8. place irm, I prefer tempit due to ease of use
9. cement SSC, clean excess, check bite
10. follow thru with bribery and give child praise and prizes
Sorry to hijack