Dental Sedation

In our office, we use a type of sedation referred to as oral conscious sedation. And we use that in order to produce a condition called anxiolysis, basically taking the edge off the patient's anxiety. We first interview the patient and go over their medical history to make sure that they're a candidate. We also will record some of their baseline physical signs, such as their blood pressure, their pulse, and their blood oxygen concentration. Those are the necessary measurements to make, to make sure that we keep them safe during the sedation procedure. Then we will prescribe for them a medication in the family of drugs that are similar to valium. And this allows a patient who has anxiety or fear of the dentist to be able to go through a dental appointment, get a number of procedures done, oftentimes not remember much of what was done. There's so many people who avoid going to the dentist altogether for fear. Over the years, I've had a number of those patients come to me and say, often sometimes in tears because they feel embarrassed because they haven't been to the dentist in a long time, the state of their mouth, and these are the patients where sedation can be a godsend to allow them to overcome their anxiety and have dentistry done in a comprehensive manner and get the care they need. And I'll tell you that having treated a lot of patients like this, a number of these patients, after having some dentistry done, gain an amount of trust where they don't need the sedation anymore. So they'll come into the office knowing that they have nothing to fear.