Dental Care and Special Needs: Planning for Success

Posted on: 22 November 2016

The dental field, like other medical fields, is always growing and changing. One of the advances of the last few decades within the dental field is laser dentistry. At this point, laser dentistry has been around for a couple of decades and has become more common within the dental field. Here are a few things that you need to know about laser dentistry.

How The Laser Works

In the dental field, a laser can be used to do different dental procedures. The laser produces intense beams of light energy. The light energy that the laser releases causes a reaction when it collides with the tissue in your mouth. A laser can be used to both shape and remove tissue inside of your mouth.

The Safety Of Using Lasers

Laser dentistry has been around for a couple of decades. At this point, it is not experimental and is a tool that most dentists would have been trained in while they were in dental school. If you go to an older dentist who has been around for decades, they have most likely received extensive training and professional development on how to use lasers as well. Lasers are often used together with other dental instruments in the course of treatment.

Treatments That Use Lasers

Laser treatment has entered more and more areas of dentistry over the last few decades. It is used in a wide variety of different procedures. Here are some of the procedures that use lasers:

• Whiten teeth
• Treat infected root canals
• Reshape gums
• Reshape bone tissue
• Reduce inflammation
• Remove overgrown tissue
• Remove muscle attachments that hurt movement
• Treat cankers
• Treat cold sores
• Treat wisdom teeth

Lasers are used in both cosmetic and general dentistry. The list above is not an exhaustive list; it is a general list of the the type of procedures that use lasers.

The Benefits Of Using Lasers

Lasers offer multiple benefits. One of the biggest benefits of lasers is that in some procedures, they can eliminate the need to use a drill within your mouth. They can also eliminate the need for you to be put under anesthesia for certain procedures, which greatly reduces the risk associated with your procedure.

Lasers are also very precise and can allow your dentist to perform much more precise dental work, which can result in less trauma to your mouth and can speed up the recovery process from major dental work. Lasers are also really good at killing bacteria and can help clean up diseased gums and tissues.

Laser dentistry has helped advance the dental field. Laser procedures are not experimental and at this point are pretty routine. However, you should always make sure that understand any dental procedure before agreeing to it. 

For more information, contact local professionals like Four Corners Dental Group Fairbanks.