This is great news for all of us, especially for me and those who visit dental clinics almost everyday to get their teeth fixed. I have been visiting my dentist in Murfreesboro (TN) for the last three years. I can still remember my first encounter with dental drills when my dentist put sealants on my lower back teeth. I hated the sound of it. So now I am hoping these painless jets would replace the drills. Thanks for this info. My dentist hasn ’t told me about this yet.
A dental drill (or dentist's drill) is a small, high-speed drill used in dentistry to remove decayed tooth material prior to the insertion of a dental filling. Dental drills are used in the treatment of dental caries. The term dental drill is considered the more colloquial form of the term dental handpiece, although it can also be construed as to include the power source for one or more handpieces, a dental engine. Handpiece and engine are more generic and euphemistic terms for generic dental tools.
Fauchard is said by some to be the father of modern dentistry. He first mentions the use of a bow drill on teeth for root canals in a book published in 1746. This device consisted of a long metal rod with a handle and a bow that was used to power it. During this time, many innovations were developed. One of these was the 1778 introduction of a near-mechanical drill, which was powered by a hand crank that activated a rotating gear. Soon afterward, an inventor added a spinning wheel to power the drill head. The motion in this device was created by the dentist pushing a foot pedal to move a spinning wheel, which in turn moved the drill head. Other attempts at mechanical drills were made during the 1800s, but they were hard to handle and inefficient, so most dentists used simple, hand-operated steel drills.
During much of the developmental history of the dental drill, the focus of research had been on increasing the speed of the drill bits and correcting the problems related to these greater speeds. However, studies have shown that there is no benefit to increasing the drill bit speed any higher than it is today. Therefore, the focus of research has shifted to developing altematives to conventional drills altogether. Two recent introductions are noteworthy and may be indicative of the direction dentistry is headed.
