❌ Painful & traumatic
❌ Uses a drill and metal tools to ream out the tooth
❌ Does not clean out bacteria & decay inside the tooth effectively
❌ Filling materials contain the heavy metal barium
❌ Higher chance of latent infection that can cause bigger health problems
❌ Costs more long-term
❌ Not considered “holistic”
✔️ Costs less short-term
✔️ Painless
✔️ A laser is used to clean the tooth interior
✔️ Cleans the tooth interior to near-sterilization
✔️ Filling materials contain no heavy metals
✔️ Very low chance of latent infection
✔️ Costs less long-term
✔️ Considered “holistic”
❌ Costs more short-term
Moonlight Beach Dental is one of the only dentists in Encinitas that provides painless root canals using PIPs and SWEEPS laser technology.
Unlike conventional root canals, laser root canals can be performed without trauma and pain.
Furthermore, laser root canals provide far better decontamination of the canal system (almost to the point of sterilization), highly reducing further dental complications/costs, and eliminating latent infections that can cause larger health problems.
The laser is used to “open” the tooth, so that the canal can be accessed. This is painless.
There is no vibration (like you would have with of a traditional drill), so there is no risk of creating micro fractures in the canals.
With the tooth “open”, the laser sends a powerful shockwave into the water in the canal.
This bounces off the walls of the root system – freeing up decay that otherwise can not be instrumented or cleaned with conventional root canals.
Again, this is totally painless, and it can take as little as 20 seconds.
Once the area is free of debris, ozone water and other agents are used to kill any remaining bacteria or spirochetes.
This is critical so re-infection doesn’t occur. Multiple sterilization steps here are a good thing!
Next, the canals are sealed with bioceramic materials that do not contain the heavy metal barium (like typical filling material).
This eliminates the possibility of any reaction due to metal allergies.
A root canal is procedure that removes decay and infection from the inside of a tooth. Endontics (“endo” means inside, and “dontics” means teeth) is the branch of dentistry that deals with that.
Decades ago, when the dentist told you you needed a root canal, that was really bad news… It was a very traumatic procedure, involving metal tools (like those pictured here) that would painfully ream out the tooth’s interior.
Strangely enough, that’s still how most dentists do it!
It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s a breakdown of the differences between a traditional root canal procedure and the new, laser root canal.
The inside of a tooth is very porous.
Imagine a visual of thousands of drinking straws stacked together. All these thousands of stacked tubules are what the tooth’s nerve fiber floats in and permeates.
When the nerve dies, and all that space becomes hollow, bacteria can soak into all those tubules and out the end of the root. This is what an abscess is.
With traditional root canals (especially the ones where people are concerned and driven by what their insurance offers) dentists drill open the tooth before using little metal instruments to ream out the inside of the tooth, which hurts. Also, inevitably when pushing something from top to bottom, some bacteria can be pushed further into the bone. There’s really no way to clean the very apex, or get to the tip of an infected root.
The dentists then essentially soak the tooth in bleach for 10 minutes. Next they fill it with a rubbery material called gutta-percha that is barium-infused. At this point, saliva and more bacteria can contaminate the tooth. Finally the dentist sears it off with a heated torch.
None of that is biocompatible. But it also doesn’t properly clean the tubules, so the chances of a latent infection are much higher.
The gutta-percha has traces of barium, which is a heavy metal. Sometimes the body can react to the barium as if it was an infection. For patients that have metal allergies, it can produce a reaction inside the bone. Infections of this nature can eat away at the bone and the tooth.
Between the barium and the bacteria, you can often see an infection or other health complications stemming from the root canal procedure.
What’s most dangerous about those latent infections is that in more than half of the cases, you feel no pain – you just experience the consequences of the infection.
The laser root canal procedure is explained step by step on this page, but here are some additional details you should know.
The laser uses sound waves and light energy, which creates something like a tsunami effect in the tooth. This brings nearly all the bacteria, decay and debris up and out of the tooth. The debris that comes up when working on your tooth is actually visible.
Using different solutions, each canal is irrigated (sometimes one tooth can have anywhere from 1-5 canals) for up to a minute per canal, before closing it. In cases where there’s a lot of bacteria present, a medication called calcium hydroxide can be used to allow the bacteria to keep draining from the tooth and further sterilize the area before it is sealed up.
Honestly, sometimes all of this is not possible to do in just one visit. If best aseptic result isn’t possible, it might take more than a single visit.
As far as filling and sealing the tooth goes, Moonlight Beach Dental uses a bioceramic sealer and gutta-percha that doesn’t have barium in it. Since there is no barium in the materials, it eliminates the possibility of reactivity or allergies to this heavy metal.
With a pH of 2 or 3, infections are acidic, and that’s what makes a hole in the bone. What you want is root canal materials with a higher pH, to help kill any remaining anaerobic bacteria and to help the body heal with a more neutral pH. The bioceramic sealer that the gutta-percha gets coated into has a PH of 12, which neutralizes the whole area and helps promote bone growth.
For a root canal to be performed to the a modern standard of care, first the dentist must own a 3D cone beam (CBCT), so you really know what you are encountering.
Holes in the bone are visible in the x-ray – especially on the 3D, CBCT x-ray, which shows the missed canals, and all the things not possible to see on a traditional x-ray.
So we’ve talked about this bioceramic sealer. Here’s the details if you are interested.
BC Sealer is anti-bacterial during setting due to its highly alkaline pH and unlike traditional sealers, BC Sealer exhibits absolutely zero shrinkage!
Yes. Unlike traditional root canals which are painless and traumatic, laser root canals are truly painless.
In addition to being painless and non-traumatic, laser root canals provide a far superior cleaning of the tooth’s interior – killing bacteria to the point of near-sterilization. This means there is a much lower chance of latent infection, less additional costs and root canal work for the patient, and a much lower chance of larger health issues due to undiagnosed abscesses resulting from remaining infection in the root canal.
In the short term, traditional root canals cost anywhere from $600 to $900. Laser root canals typically cost between $1400 and $1600, depending on the tooth. However, in the long term, laser root canals can cost less because there is a significantly lower chance of reinfection due to the superior cleaning method. Dental insurance will usually cover around $300 toward either procedure, upon approval.
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