{"id":273971,"date":"2010-02-03T17:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T22:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"Gizmodo-5463582"},"modified":"2010-02-03T17:20:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T22:20:00","slug":"its-about-time-a-drill-free-fix-for-cavities-teeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/273971","title":{"rendered":"It’s About Time: A Drill-Free Fix For Cavities [Teeth]"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>If bacteria settle in between your teeth and form a cavity, your dentist must drill through your tooth just to get at it. But now dentists can trade their drills for a simple treatment that stops early-stage cavities.<\/p>\n

The Icon system<\/a> lets dentists halt decay between teeth. Usually when a dentist spots an early cavity-when bacteria have eaten away enough tooth such that it’s a weak lattice but hasn’t yet degraded into a true cavity’s sinkhole-he prescribes an enamel-strengthening fluoride rinse and hopes the tooth heals itself. If that doesn’t work, the only option is drilling through healthy tooth to get to the problem spot.<\/p>\n

Icon, developed by dental-materials manufacturer DMG, does away with both the drill and the waiting time. A dentist simply slides a thin plastic applicator between the patient’s teeth and squirts the cavity with hydrochloric acid, which etches away the enamel to access the tooth’s deeper layers. Using a fresh applicator, he then injects a low-viscosity resin into the gaps in the tooth’s lattice and hardens the resin with a quick flash of high-energy blue light to fortify the tooth.<\/p>\n

DMG is working on a version that could hold up to the wear and tear of a tooth’s chewing surfaces, which company president George Wolfe hopes to have ready in a year. The sooner the better, he says: “One of my greatest fears is having to hold down my scared kid for a filling. Hopefully, I’ll never have to.”<\/p>\n

Popular Science<\/a> is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what’s new and what’s next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.<\/p>\n



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If bacteria settle in between your teeth and form a cavity, your dentist must drill through your tooth just to get at it. But now dentists can trade their drills for a simple treatment that stops early-stage cavities. The Icon system lets dentists halt decay between teeth. Usually when a dentist spots an early cavity-when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1736,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1736"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}