Sedation Dentistry

So sedation dentistry is something that I have performed for a long time. In fact, I became IV sedation-certified many years ago. However, what I found is oral sedation works very well for 95% of patients that have any anxiety. We can treat a patient from anywhere from just simply having nitrous oxide, some people call "laughing gas" or "happy gas." But in someone that's a little more anxious, we can also consider oral sedation, which some people call it "twilight." It has an amnesia effect so people tend to remember very little bits and pieces if anything about their appointment. And frankly, that can be a game changer for patients. If they can come in, get their dental work done, go home, kind of sleep it off, and next thing they know, they wake up and you know, their dental work's done, that can be a life changer for operation. So what's oral sedation? Well, oral sedation is using a family of medications that an oral surgeon might use, for example, when they do IV sedation. It's in the same family of medications except it's in the pill form. This helps in many ways. As we all know, a lot of patients are scared of needles to begin with. So making it easy, comfortable, is the benefit of having oral sedation.