Dr. Isabelle Farmer is a practicing dentist at Houston SmileDocs in Texas. A graduate of Texas A&M University and the University of Texas Dental School, she went on to start her dental practice in 1984. In this article, she tells us what we need to know about teeth whitening treatments.
Essentially, when you are looking at the variety of teeth whitening treatments, they are all the same. No studies have shown that the Zoom! whitening (a brand of teeth whitening) does anything more for a patient than tray whitening, so we have never used Zoom! whitening in our practice. What we do instead is use a process we call power bleaching.
Power bleaching is an effective way to whiten your teeth in a short amount of time, without the teeth sensitivity. What we do is we take a powerful bleach—a high percentage hydrogen peroxide bleach—and we jump-start the patient by using that bleach for one hour in our office under the supervision of a dentist. The reason we tell patients to stay under our supervision is because the bleach is powerful, and we don’t want the gum tissue to be affected by this bleach or irritated in any way. Additionally, we are using trays that have been specially made for each patient. So we put this powerful bleaching material in this specially molded tray, and this starts the process. After undergoing the in-office jump-start bleaching, most patients will use the tray bleaching at home for two weeks. Over this two-week period, they can expect to get lighter and lighter. And then at the end of the process, we will do another one-hour bleaching session in our office once again.
For the majority of our patients, we can significantly alter the color of their teeth in just this short two week period. In fact, I have got a patient right now who had severe tetracycline stains—really bad, almost verging on black teeth—and he is having significant alteration of his teeth color, even in just one week. His wife has already noticed the difference, and people at work have noticed, too. If you were looking at the buttons on your telephone, which are kind of gray, that is kind of what this patient’s teeth look like. So this power bleaching is having a significant effect on his teeth in a short period of time.
The other issue is that, in the past, patients have had sensitivity problems with bleaching. This was especially the case with the Zoom! bleaching, where the teeth get dehydrated. So what happens is when the teeth get dehydrated, they become super-sensitive as a result. With our power bleaching process, however, we use a product that desensitizes the teeth for patients during the whitening process. So patients have little to no sensitivity whatsoever. In fact, at the end of the bleaching process many patients are actually less sensitive than when they started. We have some patients whose teeth are just naturally more sensitive, and over the process of using this desensitizing product their teeth get less and less sensitive.
So this power bleaching process is not only effective, but actually, in many cases, it reduces the original sensitivity of a patient’s teeth as well. It’s kind of a cool process where we bleach teeth and patients have less sensitivity issues with their teeth than when they started.
Costs
Patients who are interested in the power bleaching, which includes one-hour of bleaching in the office, can expect to spend $1,050 for that service. If they just want to do the tray bleaching, which is going to take them longer to achieve the desired results because they don’t get the jump=start at the beginning and the power bleach at the end, we charge $425.
So basically, if you are going to do crowns on your teeth—in our office a crown on each front tooth would be $1,250. So for the cost of less than one crown you can get all your teeth bleached and get them really white.
The information in the article is not intended to substitute for the medical expertise and advice of your healthcare provider. We encourage you to discuss any decisions about treatment or care with an appropriate healthcare provider.
