Dental implants – getting care
Dentistry has come a long way in the last 10 years, integrating new pieces of technology into clinics and bringing procedures that used to be reserved for hospital treatment onto the high street. This has involved introducing more invasive procedures like dental implants Herefordshire to anxious patients. Let’s look at how we do it in our clinic, Warrendale Dental.
Anxious patients are often excluded from the advantages of new procedures, and with their preset anxieties to dentistry, it can be challenging to overcome these concerns.
There is a bundle of associations and usually, a multi-layered story behind dental anxiety that can be very complicated and difficult for a patient to get a hand on. We would advise any severely anxious patient to pursue therapy-based treatment at their own pace. The role of our clinic is to provide dental care and we can do so by mitigating some of the symptoms and giving access in the short term.
Oral implants
Dental implants Herefordshire are restorative processes to replace a tooth and root; it is a very enduring way to treat a patient whose tooth damage is so complete that extraction has become the only option.
Dental implants Herefordshire take place over two sessions. In the first one, the implant is placed into the jaw by us and the gum tissue is closed around it. In 4 to 12 months, once we feel the implant is fixed in place, the second stage can occur, where a crown is placed on top of the integrated implant.
Dental anxiety
If you’re a new patient or have not mentioned your dental anxiety before, it can seem that there is never a good time to approach it. All procedures start with a consultation and an assessment where we discuss what an appropriate course of treatment might be for you, and what modifications need to be put in place. This is the critical time to inform us, so reasonable modifications can be made.
Localised numbing agents
You might be aware of local numbing. It is the preferred method of managing discomfort during treatment in almost all procedures. The agent is injected into the region that needs to be numbed leaving the area without any sensation.
This applies to numbing the area alone and does not have the calming or conscious altering effects of drugs like nitrous oxide, meaning it does little to affect symptoms of anxiety.
Conscious sedation
During conscious sedation, our goal is to affect the patient’s central nervous system with a sedative-like drug that not only stops discomfort, but also has a calming (benzodiazepine) or dissociative (Ketamine) effect.
We use a mixture of IV and oral administration for conscious sedation. This gives us the time needed to start procedures and the delayed overall calming effect for longer treatments. Which treatments are used depends on your medical history and any underlying condition that may make a certain drug profile more or less suitable. But all of them significantly reduce heart rates, helping to stop the initial spiral of anxiety, all while you have a comfortable treatment with limited or severely reduced memories of the procedure afterwards.