SILVER DIAMINE FLUORIDE & HALL’S CROWN AS A MINIMALLY INVASIVE AND AEROSOL FREE APPROACH IN PANDEMIC TIMES
In the last two decades, there has been significant improvisations in the way of removing the carious lesions and fighting the severe early childhood caries menace especially in young children in any part of the world The standard protocol has undergone several modifications, more so because of increased demand from the parents for saving their child’s teeth and advances in material science and innovative equipments. Also, the current pandemic of COVID-19 warrants a repeal from conventional dentistry to an aerosol free, minimally invasive yet maximally effective clinical approach. Silver diamine fluoride (SDF) is an established modality for caries arrest in children fulfilling all the above. Similarly, rather than conventional way of removing healthy circumferential tissue, we can now place stainless steel crowns without much of a preparation and local anesthesia whatsoever. This 30-40 minute of clinical case series highlight various clinical situations routinely experienced in a pediatric dental office in which SDF & Hall’s crowns were successfully used in children between 1-10 years of age with asymptomatic carious lesions of ICDAS score 3 or more in primary & permanent teeth.
Minimally invasive pediatric dentistry is not a luxury. It is something which we owe to our child patients and their parents. At the end, doing “too much” won’t help but “doing just enough” would do wonders to our tiny superstars.
