The Sedation Dental Care Standard

Sedation within Dentistry

The criteria for treating patients using sedation were established by physicians in the U.S. around 40 years ago. It is not new for patients to be sedated when undergoing operations on knees, feet, wrists, ears, noses, or almost any other body part. A woman informed me the other day, "I had to go in for an MRI (a type of x-ray). I was very nervous so my doctor sedated me." Patients often ask dentists for sedation and the dentists do anything within their power to change their minds. The majority of dentists do not want to complete the additional training and accreditation process that is required for the sedation of patients.

You wouldn't consider having an ear operation or a nose operation without sedation. But, when moving one inch to the teeth it becomes satisfactory to tolerate time-consuming, strenuous, noisy, and uncomfortable procedures on one of the most sensitive and personal parts of the body (the mouth) without the use of sedation. Dentists try to work outside of the already recognized standard of utilizing sedation. The result is that we as dentists treat just 50% of the population, whereas physicians treat over 90%.

I have discovered that scared patients psychologically have no issue with being sedated for their dental treatment. When asking a nervous patient, "Would you prefer to have this work completed in six appointments over the following two months or during one appointment while you sleep through it?" they are likely to look at you as if you are crazy. "Put me to sleep," is their common response.

Sedation for some types of dental care has been in use for more than three decades. If you inquired as to how one hundred patients who have had their wisdom teeth removed had it done, the majority would explain that they were put to sleep by an oral surgeon for the removal process. The problem is that dentists presume that root canals and drilling on teeth is not an uncomfortable enough experience to deserve sedation. This is a reason why 50% of the population refuses to visit the dentist. The patient is the person that should determine what is too uncomfortable for them, not the dentist.

If you think that sedation, which is used as a standard of care for the rest of the body, is required for your specific dental care, call us now.

Type of Sedation

The sedation we use for our patients is oral sedation (pills). We use pills for several different reasons:

1. A lot of our patients are terrified of needles and would not enjoy being told that a needle must be used to sedate them.
2. Oral sedation allows us to work on patients for a long period of time.
3. The use of oral sedation is very safe.
4. The pills used remain in a patient's system for a few hours after the procedure, so we don’t receive many complaints of pain after the appointments are completed.

How You Will Feel

As you can see from our Patient Testimonials, our patients' take on this conscious sedation technique is that they feel confident that they have slept through the duration of the appointment. We frequently hear, "I remember taking some pills and the very next thing I remember is waking up with my teeth repaired." The majority of patients remember nothing at all about the procedure undertaken. Some remember a small amount, normally at the very end of the appointment as we get them ready to leave for home. You will require a friend or family member to bring you to our office on the day of your sedation procedure and it is important to remember that you MUST have someone there to take you home after it.

Sedation Training

Dr. Ron Receveur has received specialist training in both Oral Conscious Sedation and Advanced Life Support Skills. He is currently a member of and has received extensive training on the topic of sedation from DOCS, the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation. DOCS is the leading group of doctors within the US at providing excellent training for dental sedation. Their training regime is approved by the American Dental Association and The Academy of General Dentistry. Dr. Receveur's training, certification and safety protocols utilized within his office doesn’t just meet, but far exceeds all Kentucky State Dental Board laws and regulations.

Safety

The primary reason that we choose to use an oral sedation system is because of its excellent safety record. The pill that we utilize is a common sleeping pill. In 1996, as an example, 1,700,000 of these pills were used by people, not annually, not even monthly, but on a daily basis. An average of 1.7 million of the sleeping pills that we use were taken daily. The 1996 total for the amount of these tablets taken was 621,000,000. In the vast majority of cases these tablets were taken by patients at home in order to help them to sleep at night. We provide our patients with more than they would usually take at home, but we utilize high-tech hospital standard monitoring equipment to observe the pulse, oxygen saturation in the blood, and blood pressure of our patients.

Decision

The only thing that stands between you and the dental care that you want and deserve is a couple of tablets of medication. It couldn't be simpler.