Sleep Dentistry, Conscious Sedation, Whatever You Want To Call It – Just Call On It …
Imagine it’s the late 1980s.
Dr A. Sleep finally has his own dental clinic, the newest among a few others in the area. With a Graduate Diploma in Clinical Dentistry (Conscious Sedation and Pain Control) from Melbourne University and decades of clinical experience, having: “A. Sleep Clinic, Dr A. Sleep, BDS. Sleep’s Sleep Dentistry: conscious, and IV sedation” sign written across the front window reads like a dad joke, no matter the typeface.
It didn’t happen.
It could happen; but for the moment the only Sleep in dentistry in Australia, is biomedical scientist and academic researcher Simone Sleep – Doctor of Philosophy Scientific Lab Technician at Griffith University; furthering the idea that whenever and wherever sleep and medicine collide is mysterious and memorable.
What’s memorable and far from mysterious, is when the fear and anxiety of a dental check-up or treatment precludes it ever happening.
Sleep dentistry is the blanket name for any anaesthesia administered in the dentist’s chair. Calming nervous patients, and alleviating the inevitable pain of someone with an implement rummaging around in your mouth has been an endeavour since the numbing qualities of roots and plants could be harnessed.
The Egyptian medical scroll, known as the Ebers Papyrus and housed in Germany in the Leipzig University Library, holds the specifics of an application for toothache using the natural sedative effect of crushed henbone seeds. This papyrus prescription was recorded during the Bronze Age; more specifically during the transition from Middle to Late.
Gen Z may very well think that was the reckless suntan, Reef Coconut Oil, body bake-fest of the ’60s to the ’80s of which they were gladly never a part; their factor 60+ sunscreen forever on hand a testament. It’s interesting that as the least sun-kissed, they’re also the generation least interested or experienced in romance. Having never lived a youth of learning what compromises were not worth making in managing to balance the electric joy and blistering pain of skin heat that can come from a day spent full of light and life, who’s to know whether it’s integral to biological processes that transition the experience of heat in all its forms from the body to the soul.
The Ancient Egyptians of the period referred to – with nothing whatsoever to do with bronzed Aussies or the like – believed the soul comprised of five parts. The vital force responsible for bringing humans to life was the Ib, located in the heart; the centre of thoughts and feelings and the foundation for many beliefs in the location of the soul. Computation has replaced contemplation with people now holding the belief that all you need is Google maps and AI.
Critical thinking is on life support because life no longer supports it.
Here we are three thousand six hundred years later, still under denial and debating the pinpoint accuracy of where the soul resides, knowing only that it’s not at the White House. Over those very same millennia, never has there been denial or debate over the search and desire for pain-free dentistry.
There’s natural childbirth, and there’s natural dentistry: only one of them uses medication for pain and nobody tells you to push.
Imagine a woman experienced in natural childbirth – and as many do – conflating natural dentistry as dentistry without deadening agents. Impossible to not consider it brutal, brutal torture.
A common a judicial punishment at the time of the Ebers Papyrus scroll; yet it seems to reveal tooth pain as a suffering that should simply not be endured.
At the risk of putting people to sleep, this slow introduction to sleep dentistry is a deliberate slowdown of pace where the flow is the only place you can go.
It’s as calming, reassuring and unthreatening as twilight dentistry: being completely aware of what’s happening with practically nil emotional investment. Extractions, root canals, dental implants, gum surgeries and restorative and cosmetic work are commonly performed under this type of sedation – with or without the incorporation of nitrous oxide: the gas that’s gas for the moments in life that aren’t.
Although there is sleep dentistry that actually does put you to sleep under general anaesthetic, it happens in hospital or a specialised clinic, rather than in the dentist chair.
In dentistry, the lowest level of sedation is oral. Benzodiazapine or antihistamine is administered about an hour before the procedure, giving time for it to work on the relaxed state of a still responsive, and very comfortable patient. Even with it smoothing anxiety and making the dental appointment easier for patient and practitioner alike, it’s not considered sleep dentistry.
The term comes into play when this approach doesn’t help the fear and anxiety of the patient enough, and IV sedation is the recommended course of action. This use of more and different drugs delivered intravenously, is the usual protocol for complex and lengthy treatments.
In the dental space no-one can hear you scream because you don’t have to. Nor do you have to take to your bed at the mere thought of going to the dentist. Sleep dentistry is the happy compromise for choosing to not compromise the importance of oral health.
Sleep dentistry, conscious sedation, whatever you want to call it, call on it in Sunbury for dental anxiety. Anaesthesia administered in the dentist’s chair, for never has there been denial over the desire for pain-free dentistry.