Modern Dental Cleaning: Laser Teeth Cleaning
October 10th, 2009
Fear of dentists is common. After all, most medical specialties don’t involve the use of drills, sanders, and scraping tools. The idea of having these tools put into your mouth is enough to make plenty of people dread visiting the dentist. The problem is, the longer you put it off, the more invasive the tooth cleaning will have to be to get your teeth healthy and clean. If you’re one of the millions who dreads visiting the dentist, you should learn more about laser teeth cleaning and laser dentistry.
While traditional dentistry involves the use of a multi-attachment rotary (spinning) tool, laser dentistry is quite different. Instead of cleaning brushes, drills, and sanding heads, followed with water and suction to get rid of the stuff that’s blasted off your teeth, laser dentistry uses different wavelengths of light to accomplish deep tooth cleaning.
A laser dentistry device is used in place of the traditional dental tools and can be used for surgery, cleaning, and even whitening. You’ll have to wear protective eyewear to shield your eyes from the laser beam, but for most people that is a good tradeoff. Lasers don’t have the whirring noises, and they don’t even require physical contact with your teeth. Rarely is water irrigation necessary.
The various laser dental treatments may last only a few seconds, or they may last several minutes. With dental surgical procedures, laser dentistry is revolutionary in its improvements. Anesthesia may still be necessary, but not to the extent it is with regular dental surgery. With lasers, swelling and bleeding are reduced, and discomfort after a procedure is much less than with traditional dental surgery.
For cosmetic dental procedures like bleaching, a laser can make the bleaching agents work faster. Tooth-colored fillings for cavities can be put in and cured in minutes. You can even eat as soon as it’s done. It is entirely possible that lasers have applications for dentistry that have not yet been discovered.
The way one laser instrument can do all this is by tuning the laser to different wavelengths. Whitening agents react differently to different wavelengths. Using very specific wavelengths of lasers allows dentists to fix one problem without causing another one in reaction.
Often tartar or calculus builds up deep under the gumline, and this is discovered during routine tooth cleaning. Sometimes it is so deep under the gumline that a patient will have to be anesthetized to reach it if traditional dentistry is used. However, dentists can now perform a deep tartar scaling using the dental laser. Though anesthesia is still used, the procedure is far less traumatic and the laser breaks up tartar and flushes it out. Gum healing is much improved over traditional dentistry.
One of the best things about laser dentistry is that it doesn’t require a lot of training for dentists. Most dentists find laser treatments a great alternative to drills for those who fear such instruments. The cost of equipment and training will be passed on to the patient, but for many that extra cost is little in comparison to avoiding the dreaded drill
Laser dentistry is revolutionizing dental treatments and is eliminating many of the problems patients have with traditional dentistry. Used in everything from cleaning to surgery to whitening, lasers are amazing tools that get people the dental care they need where before they would have done anything to avoid going to the dentist. The higher cost and addition of protective glasses are a small price for many people to pay to avoid the pain of traditional dentistry.
Categories: Teeth
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