What Your Dentist Should Know Before Oral Sedation?
Oral sedation is a way of providing dental services in which you will easily overcome your phobias concerning dental treatments and dentists as a whole. However, despite being a helpful thing, oral sedation is also something about which both the patient and dentist must need to be 100% clear on a certain thing before proceeding. Because oral sedation requires the use of anesthesia, some points about your health history must need to be fully clarified so that your dentist may feel confident to proceed with the treatment. What are those point and what you need to discuss with your dentist before having an oral sedation? Learn everything here in this article from the expert advice by the famous dentist in Los Angeles Dr. Shervin Louie. Let’s begin!
Ensuring Complete Safety Before Oral Sedation: Some Main Points To Discuss With Your Dentist
To ensure that you are safe from all kinds of harmful effects, make sure you point out these things in detail to your dentist before your oral sedation:
- If you have been taking over-the-counter medications, vitamins or remedies?
- If you are taking certain types of food, whether from prescription or due to dietary need, for example like grapefruit. Grapefruit does not go well with sedation medications because enzymes in grapefruit disturb metabolizing system which breaks down certain oral sedation medicines in your body.
- How many medical conditions you have been treated for in your life before?
- Receiving any natural or alternative treatment for anxiety or depression?
- If you are a smoker or drinker of alcohol, a fact which should be told to your dentist right away because these things interfere with sedation medication effectiveness.
So, these are some of the main things you should discuss with your dentist in Los Angeles because he/she will decide whether you are safe for oral sedation or not after knowing the above.
Why Oral Sedation? A Brief Reminder
As we have already written a lengthy article on “What is oral sedation and why it is used?”, over here we are just giving our readers a brief reminder again about what oral sedation do. Oral sedation is a dental method that helps those people who are afraid of dentists or dental treatments altogether. Oral sedation is given in the form of medication and local anesthesia (in order to numb mouth) for treatment. Oral sedatives are generally given via mouth by putting them underneath the tongue to dissolve or to just swallow as a whole. Anesthesia is only utilized when there is a need for minor surgeries in the mouth.
Ready For Oral Sedation? Here’s How You Should Plan Your Oral Sedation Visit
After reviewing everything carefully from every point of view, once you and your dentist decide to go for an oral sedation treatment there are something you should be ready for before the actual visit comes. Here are those things (especially recommended by the famous dentist in Los Angeles Dr. Shervin Louie):
- Your dentist will give you an oral sedation pill before the actual day so that you can get a good night sleep and rise fresh in the morning.
- Make sure you take the day off when the appointment day comes for the oral sedation treatment. The idea behind this is to keep yourself active and stress-free.
- Stop drinking or eating anything 6 hours before your oral sedation at your dentist’s facility. This is a general guideline, which is subjected to change according to your dentist’s preference.
- Keep yourself hydrated and drink lots of water on the appointed day.
- Avoid driving or doing anything that requires you to be agile and full-in-your-senses on the appointment day. It is better to take someone with you who can drive you and get you back home after the treatment.
So, follow these general guidelines, and also ask your specific dentist on what to do pre- and post-oral sedation.
