For patients who fear dental procedures, sedation dentistry is an excellent choice for providing an anxiety free and more relaxing experience.
It allows people who are terrified of dentists to get the care they need while overcoming the condition known as “dental phobia”.
The Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation estimates that as many as 30% of people needing dental treatment avoid the dentist because they’re too afraid. Avoiding routine or necessary dental care can potentially compromise the function and health of a person’s smile and mouth. Potential health risks and discomfort can be completely avoided with sedation technology.
Dental sedation uses sedatives to relax patients into a calm state prior to initiating dental procedures. Common drugs used for sedatives include tranquilizers, anti-anxiety medications, depressants, and nitrous oxides. These drugs are administered in a number of ways such as intravenous sedation (IV), which is when the drugs are injected directly into the blood vessels found in the arm or hand.
When IV sedation is performed by a trained professional, it’s an effective and safe procedure for the patient. However, recent sedation dentistry techniques have evolved even further. Patients have the option of choosing inhalation sedation where they inhale nitrous oxide gas, or they could choose IV administration of sedatives that does not employ the use of needles.
Nevertheless, the most common sedation dentistry technique that is practiced today is oral sedation. It does not require needles and the medications are so relaxing that most patients do not even remember being in the treatment room. Patients often feel that they slept through the entire procedure. But the reality of oral sedation surgery is that a minimal level of consciousness is maintained throughout the procedure for the purposes of patient cooperation and safety.
One of the biggest advantages of using sedation dentistry is that patients do not realize the length of their dental treatments. Patients frequently report that they feel as if there procedure only lasted a few minutes, although in reality it may have lasted two or three hours Therefore, patients requiring complex procedures such as extensive rebuilding or a smile makeover that ordinarily require several visits may be performed in just one or two appointments.
In addition, patients who afraid to visit the dentist for routine or necessary procedures will frequently get the care they need because sedation dentistry allows them to actually have less fears about the anxieties that keep them out of the dentist chair.
On occasion, sedation dentistry is called “sleep dentistry,” but this is a misleading term due to the fact that patients don’t actually sleep while the procedure is being performed. However, the effects of the sedatives frequently make patients feel sleepy.
Although sedation dentistry allows you to be awake during the entire procedure, you feel so relaxed that it is unlikely that you will remember much about the treatment. It should also be noted that using general anaesthesia is not the same as sedation dentistry.
If you are interested in knowing more about this revolutionary relaxing technique, contact the Makham dentist office of Dr Nalini Sutharsan for more information.