Zap cold sores in the bud

Cold sores are small, painful, fluid-filled blisters or sores that appear on the lips, mouth or nose that are caused by a virus. They're ugly. They're painful. And they often hang around for days.

There are lots of remedies, medications and creams for these Herpes Simplex infections. And there are steps you can take to avoid them, like taking food supplements, changing toothbrushes or exercising.

But there's a new weapon that nips the problem in the bud ... or more correctly, zaps it in the bud.

Today, you can zap those cold sores, canker sores or herpetic viruses and aphthous ulcers with dental lasers.

The treatment takes a couple of minutes and is free of charge at Family 1st Dental in Sioux City, South Sioux City and other 1st Dental offices for patients of record, says Dr. Doug Barr of 1st Dental's South Sioux City office. The patients call, come in and get their cold sores zapped. They're in and out in five minutes.

"TIme is of no consequence for us. Bang! Bang!" Barr said.

The key is taking action before you have a full-blown cold sore.

"So if a patient feels like they are getting a cold sore -- and the first symptoms are it feels kind of itchy and scratchy and it will start to blister just a little bit -- they can come in ," Barr said. "If they get ahold of us or any dentist that has a soft-tissue Diode laser, they can come in and that's the best time to treat it."

The treatment is much less effective if the cold sore gets full blown and starts to matriculate into a big lesion. Once it's matriculated, the treatment won't work.

"You just shine the light a millimeter or two from the surface of the lesion for 10 seconds at three different intensities of the laser, and it pretty much eradicates the virus," he said. "I won't say that it won't reappear at all. But if you've ever had a cold sore, it's so much less intense and heals so much faster that it's almost like you don't get one."

He stressed that there is no cutting involved. It is a non-invasive procedure where the light shines on the cold sores and it gets a ltitle warm for a few seconds, but the problem is eradicated.

The laser treatment also works on those big canker sores that can form in your mouth from eating too many tomatoes, he noted.

Patients spend no more than five minutes in the chair for this non-invasive procedure.

"You don't really touch the tissue or cut the tissue with anything. It's just light emission, and what it does is it kills that virus or bacteria when you're in the chair," Barr said. "And the likelihood of that virus coming back in that same area is almost zero."

It doesn't mean patients won't get more cold sores, only that the sores will be at different locations.

Debbie Beelner, a dental hygienist at 1st Dental in South Sioux City, said her 31-year-old daughter Jenney came in with a chronic cold sore problem that had been plaguing her going on five years. It was a horrific problem with the sores on her upper lip and in her nose.

"She was starting to get them like once a month. And the previous time I treated it was like in May. And now she just came in last September. That was the next time it occurred," Beelner said. "And it was smaller and in a different place, but kind of in that general area. So we treated her again. We hope it doesn't come back there again either."

Jessica Paulsen, a dental assistant in the office, gets regular treatments, too. "It's worked every time I've ever had one," she said.

The monochromatic light waves emitted by the laser are on the low end of the infrared spectrum, and all the waves are the same, Barr noted.

"It's a low-end infrared spectrum of light, high intensity, focused on one spot. And that's why it's a soft tissue, And the Diode means that it's got two beams of the same kind of light focused on one deal through a cord," he said.