Dental Sedation Treatment

The following article on dental sedation treatment was provided by Pearl Dental Clinic.

Dental patients who are anxious regarding dental treatment usually avoid seeking treatment until their dental problems are in an advanced stage. However, dental anxiety should not prevent patients from seeking dental care as there are many treatments available these days that can be reduce anxiety and help patients have a painless experience in the dental chair.

About Dental Phobia

Dental phobia could arise as a result of unpleasant childhood dental experiences that can remain with patients for many years and prevent them from going to routine dental check-ups with their dentist. Often patients recall going to see the dentist when they were a child and the dentist removing multiple decayed teeth and leaving them in pain and bleeding afterwards. Also some patients recall having to always have new silver fillings every time they visited a dentist as a child. They might not have even needed dental fillings, but the dentist still carried out the treatment for financial gain often without the fully numbing the tooth.

When planning complex dental treatments such as root canal treatment or wisdom tooth extraction for anxious patients; the dentist must first ascertain the causes of the patient’s dental anxiety. This could be due to fear of dental injections or tooth drilling or fear of seeing the dental procedure unfold. Fear of dental injections could be rectified by using local anaesthetic numbing gel or painless injection equipment such as the wand to help reduce the pain of dental injections.

If the patient’s dental anxiety is caused by fear of tooth drilling or seeing the dental procedure unfold, dental sedation could play a vital role in relaxing patients and allowing the work to be carried out with the patient in a calm and peaceful manner. Dental sedation in dentistry usually consists of IV sedation being administered to the patient by a dental seditionist who may also administer Oxygen through a nasal tube and will monitor the patient’s oxygen saturation with a pulse oximeter and also monitors the sedative drugs to ensure that a correct dose is titrated and administered to the patient. The patient’s blood pressure and pulse will also be monitored to ensure that everything runs smoothly for the patient.

Dentist sedation is also possible but most clinicians agree that dental sedation is best administered by an anaesthetist who concentrates solely on providing the best dental sedation possible and leaves the dentist to concentrate on doing the best dentistry possible for the patient.

Many patients wrongly believe that sedation will knock them out completely and they will be put to sleep by the dental seditionist. However IV sedation is also known as conscious sedation and this means that unlike general anaesthetic, patients will be conscious during dental sedation and will breath for themselves and ventilate their lungs themselves. General anaesthetic differs in that when it causes the lungs to stop breathing, a ventilation machine then ventilates the lungs artificially and keeps the patient alive. For this reason dental sedation> is safer than general anaesthetic and therefore GA is contraindicated for most routine dental treatments.

Patients must refrain from eating and drinking for upto 6 hours before dental sedation and this is in order to keep the stomach empty and prevent regurgitation of food from the stomach into the mouth or the lungs. Sedation patients must go home with a responsible adult who could look after them whilst transferring home ideally in a private car or taxi. Sedation drugs have a tendency to cause further sedation of the patient even for up to 24 hours after patients are discharged from the clinic and hence patients should avoid signing legal documents or entering into any contracts or using any machinery in that period of time. Generally going home for rest is recommended after sedation without any exercise or strenuous activity.

Sedation usually consists of using drugs such as midazolam and propofol, both of which are powerful controlled sedative drugs and if any patients have had allergies to these drugs in the past, they should let their anaesthetist know beforehand to prevent any complications. These drugs have strong amnesic properties and this means patients will not remember afterwards what happened in the dental chair. Oral sedation drugs such as Diazepam could also be used to sedate patients but as oral sedation drugs pass through the stomach, their action is slow and they can’t be so well controlled as IV sedation resulting in an inferior dental sedation experience for the patient.

IV sedation is generally contraindicated in patients with severe asthma or during pregnancy or for patients who suffer from severe psychiatric problems. IV sedation is also not licensed for patients under the age of 16 in the UK. For patients under the age of 16, inhalation sedation using nitrous oxide and oxygen is available to ensure that younger patients have a painless dental experience.

To learn more about dental sedation treatment, visit Pearl Dental Clinic.

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