Lasers Are Changing Dentistry

Laser dentistry is an up and coming method of dental treatment that is rapidly gaining popularity among dental professionals. Laser dentistry makes use of new advances in laser technology to provide more expedient dental treatments that are safer and less cumbersome than traditional treatments. In this article we will go over some of the benefits of laser dentistry over traditional dental treatments. We will furthermore delve into a number of the main reasons why laser dentists remain challenging to locate regardless of the tremendous empirical support for the superiority and lack of risk involved with laser-based dental treatments.

Even though the practice of medicine in general has been advancing so rapidly, traditional dentistry techniques are still fairly barbaric. For example, a regular old filling is actually performed by boring into the tooth enamel with a hot drill bit. There is a real danger of permanent damage to the tooth in this very common procedure, in which case an eventual loss of the tooth would likely be precipitated.

When a hole has been drilled into your tooth, a piece of metal amalgam or ceramic is squeezed into the hole, with a high probability that the artificial replacement will wear out and require replacement in a relatively short time. By the time that is the case, there will often be a need for additional drilling. Once the wound reaches a certain size, a root canal will have become necessary. This means the full inner section of the tooth being drilled out, destroying the vital nerve tissue that exists there.

Dental laser treatment alters this sequence of events a great deal. A dentist using laser technology to perform a filling procedure will likely have no need for any anesthetic at all. The laser machinery has no moving parts and also little danger of overheating or of cracking the tooth. The laser itself destroys the bacteria that cause the cavity in the first place, which translates to a greatly reduced chance of ill effects from the procedure. What's more, a significantly smaller portion of the undamaged tooth enamel is sacrificed in the procedure, and the resulting filling will often be much more resilient.

We have considered the regular dental filling as our example, but laser dentistry technology has more to offer than this type of everyday operation. Dental lasers also facilitate oral surgery that is extremely clean and precise. Operations that have used these techniques often require no stitches or sutures, produce almost no bleeding, and present a significantly reduced risk of becoming infected because the laser that is used actually destroys the bacteria that are living in the area where the surgery is being performed. As a result of this, oral surgery that uses laser technology tends to heal quite a bit more quickly and quite a bit more cleanly than traditional oral surgery modalities.

The only reason that it is currently quite tough to find an affordable laser dentist is due to the newness of the field itself. The equipment remains quite expensive, and there are yet relatively few dentists who have achieved proficiency in using it. On account of the impressively improved safety and effectiveness of these laser dentistry techniques, it is practically assured that they will become more widely available in the next few years, as a growing number of dentists become trained in their use.