Working From The Outside In

Cosmetic dentistry is a medium which renews itself on an ongoing basis, and new discoveries are made all the time to make the processes involved faster, more effective, cheaper and safer. New innovations arrive on the scene regularly, and one of the newer methods to appear for teeth whitening is Internal Bleaching. This is not something that can be done on all teeth – indeed it may only be practised on devitalized teeth that have been party to root canal surgery and have become stained by fluids leaching in.

This process brightens teeth from the inside out. It involves drilling a hole into the tooth’s nerve area – the “pulp chamber” – and then cleaning inside the tooth. The root canal is then sealed and filled with a rubbery substance. A peroxide gel is then placed into the pulp chamber and works from this position to bleach the teeth from the inside out. This bleach can be left inside the teeth for several days and the patient left to go about their business – for this reason it is often referred to as “walking bleach”.

At the moment, no treatment like this exists for living teeth – but science continues to work on ways of making surgery and other treatments more effective. Therefore it cannot be too long before the treatment options for people looking to whiten their teeth develop still further and allow more diversity and better effectiveness in cosmetic dentistry. It will be interesting to see what is next.