Sedation dentistry is when we help people with their anxiety to be able to get the dentistry complete. With sedation dentistry, there’s different forms. There’s nitrous oxide, which is a lighter version.
There’s oral sedation, and there’s IV, and they’re both, those two are very similar. You get the same outcome, just a different way of administering it. With sedation dentistry, I have an ability to do crowns, root canals, extractions, procedures that stress people out under a no-stress environment.
Sedation options I offer at my office at West County Dental. One is with nitrous gas. You can drive yourself to and from the appointment.
It cuts down on anxiety, allows you to get things done that you maybe normally wouldn’t do just completely awake. The other form of sedation we do is oral conscious sedation. It’s pills versus needles.
A lot of people really like that. I’ve been doing it for 15 years plus, and it allows people to get done the crowns, the root canals, the extractions that they typically wouldn’t do awake. The type of sedation for each patient varies.
I have a conversation with them, and we kind of go through the different ways. Generally, they make the decision for themselves, but they also ultimately lean back on me for what I feel would help them out the best. If they’re on the fence, I opt to do the oral conscious sedation because it works so well.
It’s beautiful the way it allows people to get rid of their anxiety and have it from the whole thing. Sedation dentistry is very safe. When I administered the sedation for folks, we have a monitor hooked up the whole time, so we’re watching their numbers and keeping track of the breaths, of the heart pulse, and it’s a very repeatable process.
Sedation dentistry at West County Dental allows me to help people that have been away from the dental practice for years. Maybe it’s been 20 years, maybe it’s been 15 or less, but either way, oral conscious sedation is the key to help them obtain their goals of saving their teeth. Sedation dentistry allows people that typically in the past avoid going to the dentist to get the work completed, and what we find is that once they have it, that each time they come in, it’s more repeatable for them, and it’s not as fearful, and sometimes they don’t even need sedation dentistry after several visits.
Types of procedures that I find that are repeatable for folks doing oral conscious sedation include root canals, wisdom teeth, extractions of other teeth, even just crown procedures, or a whole mouth of fillings, or crowns, or anything in between that people just want to not be awake or alert for. Oral conscious sedation does allow me to help people that maybe are on the spectrum, that typically have a really hard time sitting still for the dentist. So whether it’s autism, or Asperger’s, or anything of those sorts that we don’t label people, we just know that people that have spectrum issues going on, oral conscious sedation allows them to get that done in a very, in a soothing and non-anxious environment.
With sedation dentistry, what we find is a lot of people ask these same questions, like how much does it cost, does insurance cover it? One of those factors we don’t really know until people come in, and we’re able to look through, and diagnose, and talk about what needs they have. In the end, what we find out is that the cost is less than what they anticipated, and it’s whatever benefit they have with an insurance, my front office can work through with them and find a plan that works best for them. With sedation dentistry, I never really knew how it would take off.
Once I got out of the military, and I utilized it quite a bit on the soldiers. In the civilian world, I didn’t realize how many people really truly wanted to be out of it for dental work, and I do a ton of it. And I enjoy it, and the patients enjoy it also, because they know now that they get things done in a comfortable, anxious-free environment, and come back, you know, now for regular visits, routine visits.
