Dental Patients Will No Longer Fear You

Laser dentistry is a totally new dental treatment modality that is quickly gaining ground among dental practitioners. Laser treatment takes advantage of recent developments in laser technology to provide more expedient treatment techniques that have much less risk than traditional treatments. Today we will discuss the major benefits of laser dentistry over standard dental treatments. We will also examine some of the reasons why laser dentists remain challenging to locate despite the large amount of scientific support for the efficacy and overall safety of laser treatment of dental conditions.

As far as much of the field of medicine has come during the past fifty years, established dental treatments remain clumsy and antiquated. For example, a simple filling is actually performed by boring through the tooth enamel with a hot drill bit. There is substantial danger of tooth fissure in this simple treatment, in which case you would probably require a root canal.

After the hole has been drilled, a bit of metal amalgam or ceramic is placed into the gap in your tooth enamel, with a virtual guarantee that the filling material will wear out and need to be replaced in a relatively short time. When this time has arrived, there will often be a need for still more drilling. After the hole attains a certain size, a root canal will become a necessity. This means the entire middle section of the tooth getting drilled out, killing the vital nerve tissue that lies within.

Laser dentistry changes this situation a lot. A dentist who uses laser technology to give you a filling will likely not need to use any anesthetic. The laser tool has no moving parts and also little fear of overheating or of destroying the tooth. The laser itself destroys the bacteria that cause the cavity in the first place, which means there is a significantly reduced risk of complication after the procedure. Also, much less of the undamaged tooth tissue is ruined by the procedure, and the end result will often last significantly longer.

We have discussed your regular dental filling as an example, but new dental laser technology extends far beyond this type of everyday procedure. Dental lasers also facilitate dental surgery that is remarkably clean and precise. Procedures performed with this equipment often require no stitches or sutures, result in minimal blood loss, and present a substantially reduced danger of becoming infected because the laser beam actually kills the bacteria that are present in the area being operated on. Because of this, oral surgery that is performed with laser technology usually heals significantly more rapidly and significantly more cleanly than the usual oral surgery modalities.

The main reason that it is currently quite challenging to find a laser dentistry practitioner is because the field itself is still so new. The equipment remains very expensive, and there are still relatively few dentists who have expertise in making use of it. On account of the impressively improved efficacy and safety of these laser dentistry techniques, it is practically assured that they will be more widely available within the next decade, as a growing number of dentists become trained in their clinical applications.