Your dental care involves more than visits to the dentist’s office, and maintaining a beautiful, healthy smile requires consistent effort on your part at home. Still, regular dental care, and sometimes, cosmetic or restorative services, is necessary to the long-term integrity of your teeth, gums, and oral tissues. To help make receiving dental treatment easier and more comfortable, or to ease your anxiety over visiting the dentist, we may consult with you about the benefits of sedation dentistry.
Why would I need dental sedation?
Unlike local anesthesia, which blocks sensation to numb your tooth and the area around it, sedation is administered to help patients relax and remain comfortable. Common reasons to consider dental sedation include;
- You require particularly extensive restorative work (i.e., root canal therapy, tooth extraction, dental implant placement, etc.).
- Your smile reconstruction involves several procedures, in which case sedation dentistry can help reduce the number of visits required.
- You experience anxiety or fear about a certain procedure, sitting in the dentist’s chair, or visiting the dentist at all.
Is there a difference between dental anxiety and dental phobia?
While many patients might feel a twinge of anxiety at the prospect of some restorative procedures, others can experience near-debilitating fear that makes it almost impossible for them to seek necessary treatment. Often classified as dental fear or dental phobia, the condition can frequently be overcome with an appropriate sedation dentistry technique.
What kind of sedation do you offer?
Choosing the right sedation method depends on your level of fear or anxiety, as well as the extent of your treatment and your medical history, among other things. For instance, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, produces relatively mild effects that wear off quickly after your procedure is completed. For more potent results, we might recommend oral sedation, which can be taken in pill form and produces a stronger state of relaxation. In some cases, a combination of nitrous oxide and oral sedation may be the best option.
ABOUT YOUR DOWNEY, CA, DENTISTS:
Dr. Hadis Reyhani, Dr. Ben Reyhani, and Dr. Pasha Hakimzadeh, DDS, provide a wealth of combined experience, along with innovative technology and personalized care, to help improve our patients’ dental health so they can enjoy smiling again. To schedule a consultation, call Downey Family Cosmetic Dentistry today at (562) 472-2433.
