Using Sedation in Dentistry
The Sedation
Standard
The
standard of treating patients using sedation has already been set in the U.S. over the
past 30 years by physicians. It is nothing new to patients for operations on knees, feet,
wrists, ears, noses, everything. A lady told me the other day, "I had to go in for a
MRI (a type of x-ray) and I was very nervous so my doctor gave me some sedation."
Patients ask dentists for sedation and the dentists do everything they can to talk them
out of it. Most dentists do not want to go through the additional training and
accreditation process that is necessary to sedate patients.
You
wouldn't think of having an ear operation or a nose operation without sedation. But, you
move one inch to the teeth and it becomes acceptable to endure time-consuming, strenuous,
noisy, and uncomfortable procedures on the most sensitive, personal part of the body (the
mouth) with no sedation. Dentists attempt to work outside of the already established
standard of using sedation. Hence, we as dentists treat only 50% of the population while
physicians treat over 90%.
I
have found that fearful patients mentally have no problem being sedated for dental
treatment. You ask a nervous patients,"Would you rather have this work done in six
appointments over the next two months or in one appointment while you sleep?", and
they look at you like you're crazy. "Put me to sleep" is all they say.
Sedation
for certain types of dental care has been used for over thirty years. If you asked a
hundred patients who have had their wisdom teeth removed how they had it done, most would
say they were put to sleep to have them removed. The problem is that dentists say,"Oh
wisdom teeth extractions and root canals and drilling on teeth is not bad enough."
This is why 50% of the population does not go to the dentist. The patient is the one who
needs to determine what is bad enough for them to warrant sedation, not the dentist.
If
you feel that sedation, which is the standard of care for the rest of the body, is
necessary for your dental care, call us.
Type of Sedation
The sedation we utilize is oral sedation
(pills). We use pills for several reasons.
- Many of our patients are needle-phobic so
they would not like to be told that we must use a needle to sedate them.
- With oral sedation we can work on patients
for a longer period of time.
- Oral sedation is very safe.
- The pills stay in a patients system for
several hours after the appointment, so we get few complaints of pain after procedures are
completed.
How You Will Feel
Most patients perception of this
conscious sedation technique is they feel that they have slept through
the appointment. The most common that we hear is "I remember taking
some pills and the next thing I remember is waking up with my teeth
fixed." Most patients remember nothing about their treatment. A
few will remember a little, usually at the end of the appointment, when
we are getting them ready to go home. You will need someone to bring
you to our office on the day of your sedation appointment and you MUST
have someone take you home afterwards.
Safety
The reason that we use this oral sedation
technique is because of it's safety. The pill that we use is a common sleeping pill. In
1996, for example, 1,700,000 of these pills were taken by people, not on an annual basis,
not on a monthly basis but on a daily basis. An average of 1.7 million of these sleeping
pills were taken daily. The 1996 total was 621,000,000 tablets taken. The vast majority of
these tablets were taken by patients at home to help them sleep at night. We give our
patients more than they would take at home but we use state of the art hospital type
monitoring equipment to assess the patients pulse, oxygen saturation in the blood, and
blood pressure.
Decision
The only thing standing between you and
getting the dental care you want is a couple of tablets of medication. It couldn't be
simpler.
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