Visiting the dentist is of utmost importance when it comes to maintaining your health. Maintaining a healthy smile isn’t just hugely important for your personal appearance, it is critical for keeping your mouth, teeth, and gums bacteria-free. Germs can all too easily spread from your mouth to other parts of your body, leaving your overall health at risk.
That being said, while we all know how important it is to visit the dentist on a routine basis, and for some people, doing so can be incredibly difficult from a personal standpoint. The prospect of someone doing work on their teeth can make some patients extremely nervous.
That’s why you’re going to want to work with a quality sedation dentist in Ashburn who understands and can calm such nervousness with a superior bedside manner.
Sedation Dentistry
For those not in the know, sedation dentistry is just what it sounds like – dentistry performed with the help of sedatives to help you relax or even sleep while dental work is carried out. When you first meet with a sedation dentist, they will review your health history to ensure that the medicines they use will not cause a negative reaction or interact negatively with any medicines you are currently taking.
Degrees of Sedation
Every patient is different and deserves to be treated as such. A sedation dentist in Ashburn can utilize different types of sedatives to different degrees, including the following:
- Inhaled minimal sedation, which makes use of nitrous oxide to help relax you while dental work is done.
- Sedatives taken in pill form, which can typically be used for minimal and moderate cases.
- Infusions via IV, which can be used in moderate to borderline severe cases.
- General anesthesia, which can ensure that you are entirely unconscious during a procedure, and is typically used for more severe cases where having the patient awake would leave them at risk of experiencing severe pain.