Sedation Dentistry
Are you fearful of going to the dentist? Do you feel sick just thinking about work being done on your teeth? We understand that not everyone is comfortable receiving dental treatment and we are here to help.
Wood Creek Dental offers a suitable solution to those patients who fear dental treatment: oral conscious sedation dentistry. Before your appointment, you will swallow a small sedation pill, and be accompanied by a companion to our office. Our experienced team will make you completely comfortable, and will monitor you closely while you are under sedation. Most patients feel no discomfort during or after the treatment, and often have little or no memory of the procedure. For more information, please visit www.sedationcare.com! The topics in this section include:
- The Sedation Standard
- 1-2 Appointments or 8-10?
- Type of Sedation
- How You Will Feel
- Safety
- First Appointment Procedure
The Sedation Standard
Physicians, or MD’s, have already set the standard of treating patients using sedation in the U.S. over the past 30 years. It is nothing new to be sedated for operations on knees, feet, wrists, ears, etc. In contrast, most dentists think we can grind, cut, and remove teeth with just Novocain. Most dentists do not want to go through the additional training that is necessary to sedate patients. You wouldn’t think of having an ear operation or a nose operation without sedation; however, 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 with no sedation. We hope to change that by offering the choice of sedation to our patients. Our mission is to successfully treat high fear dental patients using sedation.
In most cases, the patient is the one who needs to determine when sedation is needed. If you feel that sedation is necessary for your dental care, let us know. We are here to help.
1-2 Appointments or 8-10?
General dentistry is very time consuming. Patients with complex dental problems are often depressed when they’re told it will take 8-10 appointments over a period of several months to fix their teeth. This type of plan most often ends in failure for fearful patients who have been hurt by dentists in the past. They will go for one or two appointments to get out of pain and abandon the remaining treatment until they are in pain again. Many of you are familiar with this scenario since you have gone through it several times. This results in a lifetime of pain and an inability to smile due to embarrassment. Because of newer and safer sedation techniques utilizing a common sleeping pill, there is a growing trend in the United States among trained dentists to sedate patients. This enables us to complete the entire treatment in 1 or 2 appointments instead of 8 or 10. With this sedation, you will feel like you slept through your appointment and have little or no memory of the hours spent in the dental chair.
Type of Sedation
The sedation we use 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 the 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 say they feel like they have slept through the appointment. The most common response 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 we use this oral sedation technique is because of its 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 was 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.
First Appointment Procedure
When you come into our office for the first time, usually already having completed the medical history and patient information, you will be greeted by Dr. Hunt or Dr. Workman and interviewed privately in their office. The doctor will talk with you about the problems you have had in the past and what your specific fears are. After the doctor has reviewed your medical history with you and addressed any concerns you wish to discuss, he/she will do a visual exam of your teeth. After the completion of that examination they will order the necessary x-rays to diagnose and recommend a treatment plan. Normally, we ask for a few days to give the doctor time to read the x-rays and recommend treatment. At your consultation appointment we will discuss your insurance benefits, if indeed you have insurance, and present the options for your choice of treatment and discuss finances.