Hi folks: this was an interesting case for me because I was wrong in how it was going to work out, and because the laser was actually easier to use than the handpiece for visibility and access.

This patient had a crown on his tooth and broke it off, due to a number of reasons including financial and guarded prognosis he decided to have it extracted after the crown broke off.

I decided to use the erbium to trough around the tooth and also to split the tooth into two sections. I used the following ….

140 mj and 30 Hz for the tissue without water to reflect it back around the tooth, and then

160 mj and 30 Hz for the bone with water to create a trough circumferntially and finally

240 mj and 25 Hz with water for sectioning the tooth (you need higher energies in my opinion for dentin than bone).

I try to limit the air on the unit for bone relief, and what was weird is the mesial came out almost immediately.

The distal which I assumed would be easier because of the straightness of the root was more difficult. I had to go piece by piece till I got the last 5mm piece out.

I took some PA and photos along the way to show you the progress, but what was interesting is that the pen type grasp of the Delight Delivery system was acutally easier to get to the small tip at the end than my regular handpiece with a surgical length bur, which kept bumping into the adjacent teeth. I found this very interesting because I would have had to cut a flap and resect ALOT more bone if I had used the handpiece only.

Worked out well in the end but I thought it was interesting how I could get the laser into an area better than my traditional handpiece. In addition I didnt have a 400 micron tip, which is longer and thinner and would have been very useful for this exo where the roots were very very long.

Hope you like it.

Glenn