The Tools Your Dentist Uses To Care For Your Teeth
Your teeth play an important role in more than just eating properly. They change the shape of your face, affect how you speak and can change other people’s perception of you. Maintaining proper oral hygiene practices is essential to preserving good oral health. Failing oral health can lead to a host of other health problems, even increasing the risk of stroke and heart disease. Keeping up with an effective oral health routine that includes bi-annual visits to the dentist is an excellent start. Your dentist uses numerous forms of technology to provide you with the best smile they can. Today we’re going to touch on some of the tools they use to keep your smile looking sharp.
The Tools Your Dentist Uses To Care For Your Teeth
Your dentist has a broad range of tools and technologies that play an important role in your care. Each of these tools helps them address specific dental concerns and develop an effective treatment plan. These treatment plans help maintain or restore a healthy smile with beautiful teeth. Some of the most prominently used tools include:
- Digital scanner – Being able to determine the current health of your smile requires getting accurate information about them. Intraoral scanners are used to take thousands of pictures that are stitched together using special software to create a 3D image. This image can be displayed on a screen or used to print a physical model of your oral cavity.
- Zoom! Bleaching – Many clinics are taking advantage of this tooth whitening technology to provide better care for their patients. It combines LED light and a specialized whitening gel to brighten the patient’s teeth by several shades. With consistent oral hygiene, the shade change can last for months or years.
- Digital Smile Design (DSD) – Helping a patient decide which treatment course is right for them is easier when the results can be seen first. Digital Smile Design is a system that was designed to make this possible. It creates a virtual visualization of the potential results of a course of treatment.
- Laser Dentistry – The high-pitched whine of traditional dental drills is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Laser dentistry first made an appearance in 1989, but ongoing development has made it become a prominent part of modern dentistry. It has been instrumental in creating a noise-free, pain-free dental experience with shorter recovery times.
- Digital X-Rays – X-rays have been an essential imaging tool in dentistry for well over a century. Recent innovations have reduced the already safe levels of radiation patients are exposed to down to nearly negligible levels. They accomplished this while improving the accuracy and clarity of the images and rendering them in a 3D digital format. Physical films are a thing of the past, as is losing the films in transit to another specialist.
These represent some of the most common and popular tools in use in dental offices all over the world.
Talk To Your Dentist About Their Equipment
Ask your dentist about the equipment they use at their practice during your next visit. You may discover other types of technology that are in use as part of your care.
