We are constantly learning and striving to advance the standard of patient care in our office. Gum disease affects over 80% of adults and is a growing epidemic in our society. Gum Disease is a bacterial infection in the pockets around teeth. As such, we now, not only treat Gum Disease with the removal of mechanical irritants (your regular cleaning) but are also addressing the underlying infection that causes it. With that in mind, we recommend that all of our patients over 20 years old consider having their teeth decontaminated at every routine cleaning appointment for 3 major reasons:
- To kill periodontal disease bacteria and stop their infections before they cause physical destruction or loss of attachment around your teeth. Studies have shown that Laser Decontamination reduces bacterial counts from billions of CFU (colonies forming units) to only hundreds CFUs. It will take up to 6 weeks for bacteria to reach again maximum capacity plateaus.
- To biostimulate new blood vessels, collagen, gum attachment, and bone formation.
- To reduce or eliminate bacteria. During the normal cleaning process, most patients will have some areas that may bleed, this allows bacteria that are present in all of our mouths to flood into the bloodstream and sometimes settle in weakened areas of our body such as a damaged heart valve or artificial knee or hip, etc. We pre-medicate those patients that we know have a heart condition or artificial joints with antibiotics so that these bacteria cannot cause harm to these areas. Latest research shows that these oral pathogens have now been linked to a number of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis, low birth weight babies, diabetes, etc. Anything that we can do to reduce or eliminate these bacteria is a positive for our patients.
The laser decontamination process is painless and normally takes about 5-10 minutes. We highly recommend that you take advantage of this service as part of your routine cleaning.