Laser Dentistry
Question: How can lasers be used in Dentistry?
Answer: A wide variety of lasers are used to diagnose, assist, and perform various dental procedures. There are two main types of lasers used in dentistry.
- Hard Tissue Lasers: The primary use of these lasers is to cut precisely into bone and teeth. They are used to prep teeth for bonding, remove small amounts of tooth structure, and repair certain old dental fillings( not used to remove amalgam fillings, only white fillings).
- Soft Tissue Lasers: Soft tissue lasers penetrate soft tissue while sealing blood vessels and nerve endings. This is the primary reason why most people experience virtually no postoperative pain following the use of a laser, tissues usually heal quicker than with traditional surgical methods.
Although laser dentistry may improve the precision of your treatment while minimizing pain and recovery time, the technology has yet to break into the mainstream of dentistry. It is estimated that approximately 5% of all dentists have lasers available in their office today.
Major Benefits associated with Laser Dentistry
- Procedures performed using dental lasers may not require sutures
- Certain laser dentistry procedures may not require anesthesia
- Laser dentistry minimizes bleeding because the high energy light beam aids in the clotting (coagulation) of exposed blood vessels, thus inhibiting blood loss.
- Bacterial infections are minimized because the high- energy beam sterilizes the area being worked on.
- Damage to surrounding tissue is minimized.
- Wounds heals faster and tissues can be regenerated.
- Benign Tumors: Dental lasers may be used for the painless and suture-free removal of benign tumors from the gums, palate, inside of the cheeks and lips.
- Cold Sores: Low intensity dental lasers reduce pain associated with cold sores and minimize the healing time.
- Crown Lengthenings- used to rehape gum tissue prior to placement of crowns.
- Dental fillings without Local anesthetic
- Frenectomies- A laser frnectomy is the ideal treatment in children who are tongue tied this alleviates speech problems and inability to breast feed properly.
- Sleep apnea treatment- used to reshape the uvula at the back of the throat, tjis relieves the breathing problem that causes Sleep apnea.
- Teeth whitening –low intensity soft tissue dental lasers may be used to speed up the bleaching process associated with teeth whitening.
- TMJ treatment – can be used to quickly reduce pain and inflammation associated with TMJ pain.
- Tooth Sensitivity – dental lasers are used to seal dental tubules(located in the root of the tooth) that are responsible hot and cold tooth sensitivity.
Traditional dental procedures may soon be quicker and more effective thanks to the growing popularity of laser dentistry. More dental offices around the world will use dental lasers as the technology continues to improve and the cost of the technology decreases. Dentists may soon start using lasers to perform cleanings, scaling and root planning, based on the properties of the laser the procedure would become more rapid and painfree (and more expensive!)
