Assessing the Need for Sedation Dentistry
August 2, 2021
Avoiding dentists and dental clinics is not just something that children do. Many adults across the world also find excuses and reasons why they won’t see a dentist near them. Usually, this happens due to dental anxiety and underlying phobias that inform their perception of dentistry. While a dental clinic may not be the place you should plan to spend the rest of your life, you have to consider it as part of leading a healthy lifestyle. There are benefits to seeing a dentist every couple of months. Besides, modern dentistry has provided different methods and solutions through sedation dentists in The Colony, TX, to ensure that patients are very comfortable and relaxed through different dental procedures.
What Is Sedation Dentistry?
It is an arm of dentistry that deals with medication and techniques that can sedate patients prior to dental procedures. The sedation is required to promote the efficacy and efficiency of dental treatments with minimal or no interruptions. Sedation dentistry focuses on using different types of medicine that stimulate feel-good hormones in the brains of patients. This way, the patients can remain calm and relaxed even though long and complex dental procedures.
Sedation dentistry is sometimes called ‘twilight’ or ‘sleep’ dentistry. This is because some levels of sedation can cause you to fall asleep during your procedure. However, in many cases, conscious sedation is practiced during dental works, as opposed to deep sleep sedation.
What Are the Benefits of Sedation Dentistry?
To acknowledge and appreciate the importance of sedation dentistry, you must understand the benefits it presents in dentistry. Some of them are:
- Overcoming pain – during the performance of certain dental works pain may be a consequence of the different processes involved thereof. Pain from needles or other dental tools can give patients a reason to avoid dental works. However, with sedation dentistry in The Colony, you can undergo various dental treatments without feeling any pain throughout your procedure.
- Treating dental anxiety – while pain is one facet of dental anxiety, it is not the only one. Anxiety sprouts from phobias and uncertainties of what may happen. In that regard, dental anxiety can be reason enough for people not to withstand any dental works, even those as simple as a dental crown installation. With sedation dentistry, however, the medication helps you remain calm and relaxed while your dentist works on your oral cavity. For some levels of sedation, you may not even remember most of the eventualities of your procedure, which adds to your calmness.
- Controlling gag reflexes – although these reflexes are a natural response of the human body, they are not useful when it comes to performing dental treatments. The reflexes can make it impossible to access certain parts of your mouth, hence hindering proper treatment. Sedation by a dentist near you will ensure you can sit still on the dentist’s chair until your treatment is complete. Besides, for long procedures that will require you to keep your mouth open for long periods, only sedation can help you do so without frequent interruptions by your gag reflexes.
- Promoting precision – dentists in dental clinics in 75056 do not get enough credit for the nature of work they do. Typically, dental experts have to work in small tight quarters, and still need to be precise and meticulous when working. Without sedation, some of those tasks would be impossible to achieve. For example, unless you are sitting still and calmly on the dentist’s chair, how can he/she precisely extract a wisdom tooth at the furthest corner of your mouth? Such are tasks that call for high precision, which is something that sedation dentistry promotes.
- Promoting anterograde amnesia – amnesia is not necessarily a desirable or celebrated situation. However, sedation dentistry considers this a desirable outcome, especially during the performance of invasive dental procedures. The last thing you want is to have a clear recollection of every single thing that happened during your surgery. Thankfully, when you are sedated, you will have fuzzy memories. You are likely to remember very little about the smells, sounds, and sights involved in your procedure. Anterograde amnesia ensures you do not build up any bad dental memories that might further worsen your dental anxiety and phobias.