If you are nervous or afraid or anxious at the thought of coming to the dentist or having work done or you avoided coming to the dentist because of anxiety, Sedation Dentistry can truly be transformative in your quality of life, in your health, your smile, it just opens the door for you to have everything you need and everything you’ve been avoiding.
There are four main areas of sedation that we can consider when we think about dental work. The easiest is laughing gas. Nitrous oxide is something that you breathe while you’re having work done and it relaxes you, it may make you feel tired or groggy, warm and tingly, people respond differently to it. But, it can be something that relaxes you enough that a minor procedure might not be that bothersome to you. Once we leave that level we actually enter into true sedation options. The first sedation option is Oral Conscious Sedation. It is typically some medicine you will take at home, a pill, the night before your appointment and the morning of your appointment, typically an hour before you get to the dental office. We will then give you more in the procedure as we need to keep you comfortable and relaxed. Some important things to note here is you are not unconscious, you are not being put to sleep. That’s why it’s called oral conscious sedation. But the medicines have an awesome amnesiac effect when they work together. So you don’t remember much of your time in the dental office. So we’re able to oftentimes work on a patient all day long and get everything done they need and they just have a blurred memory of being in the office for a short amount of time. The important thing to also note there is that if something is uncomfortable or you need to use the restroom, things like that, you can communicate. So you’re not incapacitated in any way. You may be groggy, you may go to sleep, but we’re not actually putting you to sleep. When we go to a more deeper level of sedation, that’s where we’re looking at either an IV sedation or a general sedation appointment. If you require no memory being the office at all or even thought of using oral conscious sedation is not something that is comfortable to you we can bring a dental anesthesiologist into the office, they will intubate you, you will be under general anesthesia just like you would be if you were at the hospital having a major operation. So from just a little bit of help to a complete general anesthesia, we’ve got an option available that is safely going to make you comfortable enough to receive the dental care that you need.