Conscious sedation: the best remedy from pain and dental phobia
According to statistics, every 1 out of 3 people suffers from dental phobia, an intense fear of dentists. One of the most efficient ways to fight the dread they feel visiting the dentist is to use nitrous oxide for sedation. This latest addition to the field of anaesthetics helps the patient to calm down, relax and not to feel pain during different dental procedures and surgeries.
Nitrous oxide (also known as laughing gas) sedation is the most effective, safe and comfortable type of anaesthesia in dentistry. It helps the patient to get rid of the fear of dental treatment, and it helps the dentist to work faster, calmer and more efficiently.
In the right dosage, the nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen doesn’t have any side-effects like respiratory tract irritation. It doesn’t really change inside the organism, and it’s excreted in 10-15 minutes after the procedure ends. This type of sedation is widely used in child odontology.
To hold children in a dental chair for any considerable amount of time is very difficult as it is, but if the child in question is also afraid, the task becomes almost impossible. The sedation with laughing gas will help the child to withstand calmly any necessary procedure. It will also prevent the emergence of the dental phobia in the future, as the visit to the dentist becomes associated not with painful experience but with a pleasant one. Not to mention that it would be much easier for the doctor to carry out all necessary procedures without being distracted by crying toddler who can’t be made to sit properly in the dental chair and to open up their mouth!
Conscious sedation (as this method is called in Spain and other countries) has almost no contraindications. It can be used in various different difficult cases. For example, this type of sedation may be used with patients who have mental problems and have certain difficulties in understanding the necessity of dental procedures. There are other patients, who suffer from uncontrollable intense fear of dentists. The conscious sedation helps with these cases as well.
Sedation with nitrous oxide works marvellously during complex lengthy surgical procedures like the setting of dental implants. This type of anaesthesia makes the procedure easy and comfortable for the patients. Moreover, this sedation helps to minimalize the time needed for treatment: just in one hour, the doctor will be able to perform much more procedures, treat more teeth and set more implants, if the patient is under laughing gas sedation instead of regular ways of anaesthesia.
