Overcome your dental fears with soft tissue laser treatments

Lifestyle Thursday 25/January/2018 10:32 AM
By: Times News Service
Overcome your dental fears with soft tissue laser treatments

Our goal as dentist is to help our patients reach their treatment goals with greater efficiency, specificity, and comfort. Dental treatment should no longer be a painful experience for patients walking through our clinic doors.
The field of dentistry is ever-changing with advances in clinical dentistry. Newer innovations are making practising dentistry easier and understanding the requirements of our patients we are constantly striving to update the practice with innovations to make dental treatments more effective. Laser dentistry is one such preferred technology used by dentists all over the world to improve the quality of dental treatment.

What is soft tissue laser dentistry?
The term LASER is an acronym for ‘Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation’. Soft tissue laser treatment is rapidly gaining momentum in dental practice, mainly because of its ease in application and more importantly it helps in making procedures quicker and more comfortable for our patients. Laser in dentistry has over the years improved dental procedures by helping the dentist by giving them the control with correct power and duration of laser on soft dental tissues to treat a specific area without damaging the surrounding tissues. It works best for patients who get anxious about getting a dental procedure and really prefer comfort. Lasers can be used for a variety of procedures for example: removing soft tissue, treating decayed teeth, gum-related treatments, and even whitening teeth.

How does it help the patients?
We have patients with extra gum tissues wanting to correct their gum line and shape to overall improve their smile aesthetics. For such cases I recommend soft tissue laser treatment for my patients who want to remove gum tissue to improve their gum line. Laser can help in the removal of soft tissue in a very precise manner; it helps our patients really predict outcome even before the treatment is done. Another fantastic use of lasers in uncovering an impacted tooth or removal of extra tissue to enable correct bracket placement during orthodontic treatments. We can gain access using lasers to a tooth that might have extra gum tissue preventing proper bracket placement and thereby greatly improving the efficiency and providing optimum placement of orthodontic bracket. What is even better for the patients is the fact that this can be done all with the use of topical anaesthesia and eliminating the need to have an injection making it a win-win for us as well as the patient.
As lasers are so versatile that they can be used for range of treatments in the dentistry. Soft tissue lasers are effective in endodontic treatment like root planning to see the canals and assists in bacterial reduction and disinfecting. Laser used for scaling helps in removing the calculus and plaque from the root surfaces.

Benefits of soft tissue lasers
Laser technology for soft tissue surgery has evolved over time and laser-based treatments holds great promise in dentistry as is works great in targeting specific cells, pathogens, or molecules. Some the key benefits of are:
Greatly reduces pain, making it comfortable for patients to undergo dental treatments.
Offers dentists accuracy and precision in procedures.
Minimal damage to surrounding healthy tissues.
Lasers help in the clotting the exposed blood vessels and reduces blood loss, enabling dentists to perform bloodless procedure and causing diminished swelling.
Accelerates wound healing.
Gives patients protection against primary and secondary infections.

However, laser in dentistry is yet reach full potential, getting laser treatment does not eliminate the use of drills and anaesthetics yet. You can still expect the traditional drills to shape the filling, adjust the bite, and polish the filling even when laser is used. But in years to come it will be able to work on teeth that have already fillings in places. Eventually, dental lasers could make it possible for dentists to access any part of a tooth, replacing the need for the traditional dental drill. This may help to relieve the fear and anxiety many people experience when they go to the dentist. [email protected]
(Dr Puneet Soratur is Senior Dental Surgeon at Wassan Specialty Dental Centre; www.wassandental.com)