Laser dentistry is an up and coming paradigm in dental medicine that is rapidly gaining popularity among dental professionals. It takes advantage of new advances in laser technology to offer more expedient dentistry experiences that are safer and less cumbersome than the standard of care. In this article we will examine the major benefits of laser dentistry over standard dental treatments. We will furthermore examine some of the reasons why laser dentists remain challenging to locate despite the tremendous empirical support for the superiority and great safety profile of laser dental treatment.



As far as much of the medical field has accelerated during the past half century, traditional dental treatments are still rather violent and unfocused. For example, a simple filling requires drilling through the enamel of your tooth with a hot drill bit. There is substantial risk of permanent damage to the tooth in this everyday procedure, in which case the tooth would eventually be lost.

When a hole has been drilled into your tooth, a piece of metal amalgam or ceramic is squeezed into the hole, with a virtual guarantee that the piece of amalgam 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 still more drilling. When the cavity attains a certain level of depth, a root canal will have become unavoidable. This means the whole inner section of the tooth being drilled through, killing the delicate nerve tissue that lives inside.

Laser dentistry changes this sequence of events quite a bit. A dentist making use of laser equipment to give you a filling will likely not need to use any anesthetic. The laser equipment has no moving parts and also no danger of becoming too hot or of destroying the enamel. The laser actually kills the bacteria that create the cavity to begin with, which means there is a dramatically reduced chance of complication after the procedure. What's more, much less of the undamaged tooth tissue is ruined by the procedure, and the filling that is provided will likely be far more durable.

We have considered your basic cavity repair as an example, but laser dentistry technology extends far beyond this type of common procedure. Dental lasers also make possible oral surgery that is unusually clean and precise. Procedures performed with these technologies often have no need for any stitches, produce very little bleeding, and have a substantially reduced risk of becoming infected because the laser beam actually destroys the bacteria that are living in the area being operated on. As a result of this, oral surgery that is performed with laser technology tends to heal quite a bit more rapidly and quite a bit more cleanly than ordinary oral surgery modalities.

The main reason that it is currently so challenging to locate a laser dentistry practice is largely because the technology is simply still so new. The equipment remains quite expensive, and there are yet relatively few dentists who have proficiency in using it. Due to the impressively improved efficacy and safety of these laser dentistry techniques, it is practically guaranteed that they will be more widely available over the coming years, as a larger proportion of dentists become trained in how to use them.