Laser Periodontal Therapy

Gum Dis­ease and Treat­ment Options

Whether you call it peri­odon­ti­tis, peri­odon­tal dis­ease, gum dis­ease, pyor­rhea, or any­thing else, gum dis­ease is respon­si­ble for more lost teeth in the US than any other cause.  Bet you didn’t know that, did you?  And did you know that stud­ies show that up to 80% of Amer­i­cans have some level of this chronic infec­tion?  That’s a scary sta­tis­tic, espe­cially since peri­odon­tal dis­ease is also linked to wors­ened dia­betes and increased risk of heart attack and stroke.  So if you have gum dis­ease, what can you do about it?  Well, here’s a quick run-down on the tra­di­tional treat­ments for it, and then we’ll talk about an amaz­ing gum surgery alter­na­tive treatment!

• Scal­ing and Root Plan­ing, aka a “deep clean­ing;” while good at remov­ing the tar­tar (cal­cu­lus) from the teeth and some dis­eased gum tis­sue, it can’t actu­ally kill the bac­te­ria respon­si­ble.  Some­times done together with surgery.
• “Pocket reduc­tion” peri­odon­tal surgery, which was essen­tially cut­ting away the gums, leav­ing long tooth roots exposed and sen­si­tive, and the recov­ery usu­ally took a cou­ple weeks.
• Antibi­otics, such as Arestin, which may help a little.

LANAP : The Laser Gum Surgery Alternative

Cur­rently (as of early 2012), only 5 Char­lotte den­tists offer this excit­ing, effec­tive, and com­fort­able treat­ment alter­na­tive to treat mod­er­ate and severe gum dis­ease, and we are proud to be one of them, because we see just how awe­some the results are!

Devel­oped by Drs. Robert Gregg & Del­win McCarthy, LANAP is a patented pro­to­col.  Their desire to pro­vide the best for the patient means that every den­tist must be thor­oughly trained and licensed in the exact pro­ce­dure that has been tested for years.  In addi­tion, LANAP is the only laser treat­ment for peri­odon­ti­tis with pub­lished lit­er­a­ture to back it up.  So what that means to you is that it is safe and really works.

LANAP is a pro­ce­dure that involves mul­ti­ple steps in a pre­cise order.

1. We cre­ate a small open­ing all the way around the teeth with the laser, which kills bac­te­ria and the infected gum tis­sue, then begins break­ing down cal­cu­lus (tartar).
2. We use var­i­ous instru­ments to thor­oughly remove as much of the tar­tar build-up as possible.
3. We use the laser again to kill more bac­te­ria and to form a clot around the teeth;
4. We adjust your bite to remove any areas where you may be grind­ing your teeth and loos­en­ing them.
5. There is a series of follow-up vis­its to care­fully eval­u­ate your healing.

Videos to Learn about LANAP

The fol­low­ing 2 videos were put together to help you under­stand gum dis­ease and the dif­fer­ent ways it can be treated, as well as why Laser Peri­odon­tal Ther­apy^TM is so effec­tive and our pre­ferred recommendation.

What is MOST remark­able about LANAP, though, at least in my mind, is that the recov­ery is amaz­ingly fast.  All but a cou­ple of our LANAP patients were back at work the next day, and most have only needed some ibupro­fen the evening of the surgery.  Just lis­ten to Milli’s experience:

To make an appoint­ment for a Com­pli­men­tary Consultation:

Request an Appoint­ment Online or call us at 704–364-7069.

We’ll look for­ward to meet­ing you soon!