Dental Curing Lights

What is that blue light you are shining in my child's mouth? Dentists are very gadget oriented. We love the newest gizmos some of which are valuable to our clinical practice and some which are not. One of the advances in modern dentistry is the advent of light cured composite restorative materials (in other words-white fillings). The filling material starts out like a putty like substance you place and contour into the cavity preperation. You shine this blue looking curing light onto the material. This causes a polymerization reaction and makes the material get as hard as a rock (harder really) in just a few seconds.


The light is not an ultraviolet light or a laser. Originally, they were a really bright projector bulbs with a loud cooling fan, cords and everything. Now the newer ones are wireless LED's which do not produce much heat. The light travels down a fiberoptic glass bundle to the tooth. (That's the curved rod looking thing). I think most of the cost of the things is making the fiber-optics. They also have reduced the curing times by adjusting the frequency of the light to match the chemical in the material that initiates the reaction-roughly 470nm. Curing times used to be about 40 seconds. The most recent one claims a 5 second cure. That seems a little too short for me, but we will see. They make the thing beep every 10 seconds or so as a timer, so you might hear a mysterious "beep" noise while in the dental office. For all this fancy technology, I tell the kids it's a flashlight, (which it pretty much is).

Oh, this is a short funny video showing the "flat (dead) battery" feature. Of course, I always dress in a tux in the office:



There are some other cool videos out there for different companies version of these lights, especially if you go deeper into their websites. Ivoclar has a Ivoclar James Bond Theme Video-A License to Cure

Light frequency distribution chart courtesy ADA Professional Products Review Vol. 4 Issue 4 2009.