FOLEY, ALABAMA — Today, the last thing a child wants to hear from their parent is, “Let’s go to the dentist” … until now. Dr. Dayton Hart and inventor Wilfred Pye have co-developed a patented instrument that can clean tooth decay and clean out cavities with water — no drill, no blood, no pain.

Think Waterpik, which can remove food and dirt from a tooth, but the water splashes out. It doesn’t cut. This tool — the D3Dayton — uses and delivers processed water that actually has the ability to cut and take out the decay.

“This attaches to a pressurized water delivery system that shoots pressurized water,” says Pye. “When you put this on a black cavity, it scours it out.”

Some wonder, “Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?”

“For as long as there have been drills, people have been trying to use pressurized water to clean cavities,” Pye says. “But until we had this technique to bend the water inward to gouge out the black, it all splashed away and wouldn’t work right. This way you’ve got a chiseling effect.”

There are benefits of the D3Dayton tool for the dentist as well as the patient.

It's an inexpensive tool for a dentist; it doesn’t have a drill, so no blood or cause for infection; and since there’s no drill or cutting the gums, there is no need to deaden the tooth, no need for anesthesia, laughing gas or the possible adverse effects some patients have from anesthesia.

“Why is everybody scared of the dentist?” Pye asks, “The pain. Well, there’s no pain with this tool because the tooth is just getting washed out.”

Hart explains what happens when a drill hits the gums.

“It tears the gums up, causes hemorrhaging, and it’s hard to get a good filling there when it’s all bloody like that,” he says. “This amazing thing about this is that you can put it on the gums and it won’t degrade the gums.”

With a cavity cleaned out, then the dentist can fill it.

The process began about four years ago, and the D3Dayton was first successfully used on a child about two years ago. They achieved a large working prototype and began making it smaller and smaller.

“A kid’s mouth is so tiny,” Pye says. ““It’s easy to squirt water in a kid’s mouth, but when you’ve got to put a tool that’s processing water in it, you’ve got to keep shrinking it. The miniaturization took us a year to get everything small enough to get around inside a kid’s mouth to take out a cavity anywhere in the mouth.”

Pye explains what it was like using this tool on a child. Children have experienced tickling, but no pain.

“When we did our first kid, it was pretty amazing,” Pye says. “He said, ‘When are you going to start?’ And we said, ‘It’s over!’”

As far as expenses, Pye and Hart have developed this tool to be available to dentists for $1,000. Hart says a dental chair alone can cost $22,000.

“The cost is no problem for an American dentist, but poor countries around the world; they can afford this; Pye explains. “I would say this is no dangerous that brushing your teeth.”

So what is the next step for D3Dayton?

“It’s not functional clinically yet,” Hart says.

This is because companies can't sell prototypes. The tool can’t be mass-produced until there is a factory dedicated to it.

“That’s the next step; this is where you’d usually go on a show like ‘Shark Tank,’ Pye says.

“We’ve got to raise about $400,000, which is not a lot of money to a Shark investor. But they want maximum profits by hiking the sales price. That's a bad scenario because our priority is an inexpensive sales price.

“We want this thing to be manufactured economically so every dentist in the world can afford it and get it,” Pye says. “We’re concerned senior citizens; we’re not out to make a quick buck and gouge everybody. We want to get this out. So we’re starting off small, raising about $200,000 on this first crowdfunding campaign, and that’ll get us halfway to a factory. We can do another campaign later to finish it up and get it done.”

Crowdfunding is where online patrons either donate cash or pay in advance for later rewards from start-up businesses. In this case, donors can utilize prepaid certificates to later get a child's tooth done for free with D3Dayton dentists.

Hart says the worst thing about being a dentist is making people be in pain.

“What’s hard on him is he’s the one dealing with the pain,” Pye adds. “To make people suffer … it’s bothered him all his life.”

This is what Hart is trying to do, get rid of the fear. Young children grow up in fear of the dentist because of an unpleasant experience and as adults, they’re just terrified. Dr. Hart’s mission is to stop children suffering in dental chairs.

For more information:

DentalDynamicDevelopment.com or D3Dayton.com