Sedation Dental Care – What's It All About?
Patients unfamiliar with sedation dentistry can find it confusing and wonder about safety. They often don’t understand how or if it is used in conjunction with “traditional” anesthetic approaches used in dentistry. One of the most significant changes in the field of dentistry is the availability of sedation dental care – providing the same levels of comfort that are routinely provided by doctors of general medicine and related fields of specialty. The ADA and regulatory state dental boards across the U.S. are facilitating this change in dentistry and helping to ensure that dentists who provide sedation dentistry do it safely. The questions and answers below are intended to help you understand both some of the history as well as a broader explanation of how dentistry is safely being made more comfortable than ever for patients.
When did dentists start using sedation?
Perhaps the better question is, “When did dentists start providing pharmacological pain management techniques?” Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist, introduced the use of nitrous oxide in the 1840s. One of Wells’ students, William Morton, demonstrated the use of ether as anesthesia. They were progressive thought leaders in the field of pharmacological pain management for not only the field of dentistry, but
Click here to continue reading