Having the perfectly aligned sparkling white teeth is everyone’s desire. But if that comes at the cost of visiting a dentist, clouds of fear or anxiety circle around the mind. It doesn’t matter if one’s previous meetings with a dentist were good or bad, every new meeting brings along some fear.
Needless to say, dental checkups are necessary to ensure that the teeth are in their best condition and tooth decay is kept at bay. Since a vast majority of people including children are scared of visiting a dentist, sedation dentistry comes to their rescue.
Sedation dentistry involves the administration of oral sedatives that helps the patients relax during dental procedures. It doesn’t matter if you have visited your dentist for an invasive procedure or a simple tooth cleaning, sedation can be used for anything. However, the severity of fear is a key determinant of how much the sedative needs to be administered.
Sedation is used in a multitude of methods. The most common types of sedation used in dentistry are as under:
1. Inhaled sedation: As the name suggests, sedatives such as nitrous oxide combined with oxygen is administered to the body via the nasal passage that helps you relax. The dentist controls the level of gas that needs to be given to the patient. This is the only type of dental sedation wherein you are conscious enough to drive yourself home post-treatment.
2. Oral sedation: Before proceeding with the treatment, the dentist analyses the severity of a patient’s fear along with many interrelated factors. Sedation ranges from minimal to moderate. In the case of minimal oral sedation, a sedative pill is given to the patient usually half an hour before the procedure. Moderate sedation has a very mild anesthetic effect on a person making him feel groggy sometimes. But a gentle shake is enough to put all the grogginess at bay!
3. IV Moderate sedation: This type of sedation is intravenous. The sedative is administered in the patient’s body via veins thus it works more quickly. Dentists can properly manage the amount of sedative to be administered. Mild dizziness can happen due to the sedative which eventually fades away in some time.
4. Deep sedation and general anesthesia: Dentists usually administer this type of sedation to the patients who are either very scared of the dental procedure or whose procedure is likely to take a lot of time. As the sedative is given to the patient, he might either be almost unconscious or totally unconscious. The procedure hence becomes painless and the effects of anesthesia wear off or are reversed with medication.
Sedatives make the entire dental procedure painless and comfortable without causing any harm to the body. For anyone who has the real fear of visiting a dentist can still, get the dental checkup and procedure done right without any pain and discomfort via sedation dentistry.
