Excellent KOR Whitening Experience in Henderson, NV

I was told, and it has been my experience to date, that this is a permanent change. I have been advised to just whiten 1 or 2 times per month from now on to maintain the level of brightness.

So nice to hear there is hope for tetracycline-stained teeth!  Congratulations on your beautiful results.  Is the coloration on the teeth even, or are there lines or strata or anything.  It's difficult to see from far away, but it's nice to know what people can expect, close-up :D.

I also fixed the name of your doctor :).

How can I send you a closeup pic? My teeth coloration is quite even - no lines or strata. Maybe a tad whiter at the bottom then the top by the gums but nothing you would notice.

Is posting the picture in your review not working?  I'll send you a private message… :)

Awesome!  That is so wonderful.  Thank you for the close-up pictures.  It shows everyone a realistic result that they can hopefully aspire to.  Beautiful!

I'm not sure how I happened to stumble on this thread, but let me try to answer your question and a lot more... There are magnetic forces within molecules that hold the atoms together. Remember that electons have a negative charge, and protons have a positive charge. There are very specific types of these magnetic fields that are called chromophores. These chromophore magnetic fields absorb visible light. So the teeth do not reflect as much light, so the teeth look darker. All peroxide based whitening products whiten by two simultaneous processes -- oxygenation and conversion. Oxygenation cleanses out some of the stain and color molecules, and the conversion actually breaks apart those chromophore bonds. It's like pulling apart a magnet. Think of it this way...when you pull apart a magnet, the pieces of that same magnet love to "snap" back together. And the stronger the magnet is, the more difficult it is to pull it apart. And the stronger it is, the more the magnetic field reaches out and tries to snap it back together again. Well, chromopore bonds work the same way. You can pull them apart (which makes the teeth white), but they love to slowly, over time, snap back together. That is why ongoing maintenance is important -- to keep those chromophores disassociated. Just like magnets, there are weak chromophores and strong chromophores -- and anywhere in-between. Tetracycline stains are the STRONGEST chromophores possible. They are VERY difficult to pull apart, and they will always want to snap back together. As you have already learned, KoR is unchallenged as the most effective whitening system in the world. And there are several KoR Whitening systems available, depending on your needs, your desires and your budget. But for tetracycline...it's all or nothing. Nothing short of the KoR Max ULTRA version of the KoR system will help. A dentist well trained in KoR whitening would need to see the patient and determine exactly what is needed, but I'll go over what is the most common approach that my research has come up with and what I recommend as a starting point in the KoR Training Manuals specifically for tetracycline cases. Just remember that, depending on your particular case, your dentist may alter this. Now, keep in mind that 95% of all patients having KoR Whitening done only wear their at-home whitening trays for 2 weeks. So below I'm ONLY talking about difficult cases like tetracycline. After the very unique impressions (molds) of your teeth, the highly precision KoR-Seal Whitening Trays are fabricated. My first clinical study on teeth whitening was back in 1977. And I invented what are now called KoR-Seal Whitening Trays several years ago. You then have an in-office whitening visit that we call the "conditioning visit". This is mostly intended to start cleansing the microstructure of the teeth so that the at-home whitening is more effective. But don't expect to much or any whitening from the conditioning visit. Then typically you wear your KoR-Seal Whitening Trays during sleep nightly for 6-8 weeks. Then you have a high concentration whitening visit in the dental office. Then again nightly wearing of the trays for another 10-14 NIGHTS (not weeks) to help "set" the color (help push those chromophores even farther apart). Then in many cases, I recommend what I have termed, "Accelerated Maintenance". Of course this would be optional to the patient (but I highly recommend it). This would be, for example, wearing the trays 3 nights a week for a month, and then 2 nights a week for a month, and then 1 night a week for a month. And then going into your long-term maintenance, which is normally once or twice a month. So yes, the cost of treating a tetracycline case is signifiantly higher, but still it's WAY cheaper than the alternative of grinding all of your front teeth down for porcelain crowns or veneers. And YES, even with veneers, when you have tetracycline staining, the teeth have to be ground on significantly to enable the veneers to be thicker to block out the dark tooth underneath. And upper and lower veneers will typically cost $20,000 - $40,000. The final thing I'll leave you with to think about is that nothing is perfect. When we say that KoR can whiten even tetracycline, we do NOT mean that you will get perfectly white teeth. KoR is not magic. it's science. And dentists are caring healthcare providers, not gods. So with tetraycline staining, we can never say HOW MUCH your teeth will whiten. But given that KoR is the only system that can routinely have a major impact on tetracycline staining, even 50% improvement is a miracle. And most of the time, the result is significantly more than 50%. And sometimes it's nearly 100%. So be careful to manage your expectations. I don't believe that any researcher or dentist in the world has been involved in research of whitening as long as I have, and I can tell you with certainty that even with all my experience and understanding of whitening and tetracycline, there is no way that I would ever be able to tell a tetracycline stained patient how white their teeth will get prior to treatment. Hopefully this explanation will help those of you with tetracyline staining understand a bit better. Very best, Dr. K

Thank you so much for taking the time to give this answer!  You're always so thorough and I really appreciate it!