One of the most important things that any dentist’s office can do is find and fill cavities. After all, if left untreated the cavities can cause patients a great deal of pain, perhaps eventually causing them to lose their tooth entirely due to decay. As such, time is of the essence when searching for these problem areas. Before, the only way to find cavities was to essentially poke and probe around a patient’s mouth looking for evidence of decay. This method has been used to find a great deal of cavities in the past and has long been an integral part of the traditional dental checkup.

However, this method is only 50-75% accurate when it comes to finding cavities, meaning that a very sizable chunk of patients who have the affliction suffer unnecessarily with tooth pain while they await their next dental appointment. Cavities can be very hard to find. They might hide along a fissure line or inside a biting surface for example, making them quite difficult to detect. Plus, cavities which are smaller than the head of the device used to probe for them have no choice but to go unnoticed. In other words, many cavities were being found using these older methods, a good deal of them were being missed as well.

The DIAGNOdent Advantage

Unsatisfied with settling for a procedure which failed one out of every four times it was performed, The Frankel Dentistry team searched for a better solution, and we found one in DIAGNOdent. This device is a laser diode which is designed to find decay even in spots unseen by the naked eye.

  • First, we aim the diode at a healthy tooth so that it can get a baseline wavelength, a concept of what a tooth without decay feels like which it can use for the purposes of comparison.
  • Then, we go over the rest of your teeth. As the diode scans your teeth it looks for fluctuations in its wavelength, places where the laser reflects back in a different way. These areas are experiencing decay.
  • Using this method we can far more accurately pinpoint areas of concern and, when the time comes, our fillings can be much shallower and more precisely placed.

Our use of the DIAGNOdent laser diode is just one example of the ways we use the most up-to-date, effective dental technology available to improve your experience and provide you with a higher level of care.