A Healthy Smile Is Important for a Great Overall Appearance

Discovering you have gum disease is never the best news you can receive, yet this is a disease that affects a lot of people each year. Gum disease, also called periodontal disease, is an infection of the gums, and it can leave you toothless if you ignore it and fail to get treatment for it. One of the most common forms of treatment for this is scaling and root planing; however, many dentists are now offering laser treatment for gum disease. Here are several things to understand about this procedure.

Why You Need It

Leaving gum disease alone will not help it go away. In fact, gum disease is a progressive disease, which means it will worsen over time if it is not treated. If you leave gum disease untreated, it will continuously eat away at your gums. You will most likely suffer from bad breath too from gum disease. Additionally, it can cause you to lose your teeth, because your gums hold teeth in place. As your gums recede, they can fail to hold your teeth in place, and this is what causes a loss of teeth.

Why Dentists Use Lasers to Treat Gum Disease

While you could undergo scaling and root planing as a form of treatment, the use of a laser for treating gum disease offers a lot of significant benefits. First of all, it is less painful. When a laser is used to treat any type of health problem, the laser is aimed at the problem. In this case, a dentist aims it at the infected gums. The heat and energy from the laser remove the infected gums without a lot of pain.

Secondly, the light and energy from the laser will actually destroy the infection in your mouth. When you go through scaling and root planing, a dentist scrapes away the infected gums, but this procedure does not help completely when it comes to infections. A laser, on the other hand, does. Whenever a laser is used in dentistry, the patient has a much lower chance of developing an infection after the procedure is complete.

Finally, dentists are able to target infected gums easier with a laser than with other procedures for treating gum disease. This means you will keep more healthy gums and eliminate more infected gums.

If you have gum disease, you should never ignore it. To learn more about laser periodontal therapy, contact a dental clinic today.