For children, visiting the dentist can be a bit stressful, particularly at first when it’s still a new experience. Happily, dental technology is advancing all the time, making the experience more comfortable for children in many ways.
Advances in dental technology are improving the quality of care your child receives, and they're also making the experience itself more comfortable and efficient, too.
These benefits are especially important for children. Those first few experiences in the dentist’s chair often have an enormous impact on how people approach visiting the dentist throughout their lives.
This means that if those first experiences are stressful and alarming for your children, they won't set a very good precedent.
With smart, effective advances in dental technology, we can avoid many of the factors that made dental care uncomfortable or alarming for children in the past; or at least, we can significantly reduce the impact these factors can make.
A good example of this taking impressions of teeth, which these days we can do with a scanning wand. These wands are quick and easy to use, and they eliminate the need for that gooey alginate impression material that we used to use (and that you may be familiar with!). This eliminates the gagging, weird flavour, and the general discomfort it can cause children.
Another example of an advance in dental technology that makes dental care a less trying experience is the hard tissue laser. The hard tissue laser can make visiting the dentist a better experience for children in a couple of important ways.
First of all, the dentist is using a laser on their teeth! There are few kinds who wouldn't consider this a pretty neat and exciting idea. And because they think it's cool, they'll be more likely to submit to dental work without a fuss. But even more importantly, using the hard tissue laser allows us to perform most standard filling procedures on primary teeth with only a topical anesthetic. In turn, this significantly it reduces the need for sedation.