Sleep Dentistry

According to the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation (DOCS), about 30% of the population purposefully avoids the dentist due to the amount of anxiety they feel when getting their teeth cleaned or worked on. As a result, dentist offices everywhere have been developing techniques to ease the anxious feeling some people get when going to the dentist.

Unfortunately, some people, whether they’re children or adults, have an even greater negative reaction to specific sensory situations such as bright lights or loud noises in tight spaces. This is due to certain developmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. Recently, these types of disorders have been brought to the public’s attention, which is good news. Instead of avoiding the issue, people are trying to remove the stigma around mental health disorders.

At Collegeville Pediatric Dentistry, every child is precious, and every child’s healthy smile is important to us. As stated previously, dentists and pediatric dentists have been developing various ways to treat people who are overly anxious when coming to the dentist. One of these techniques is sleep dentistry. We say, “sleep” but it’s more of sedation dentistry. Your child is conscious the whole time. This helps keep a level of cooperation between the doctor and the patient.

Over the years, oral sedation has been used more and more. It’s a simple procedure that involves swallowing medicine as opposed to having it injected via an IV, because if you’re trying to keep patients calm at the dentist, introducing a needle probably won’t help. This won’t knock your child out. It will merely put them at ease. They’ll be so comfortable that, a procedure that may take an hour or so, will feel like only minutes to them.

However, during more invasive procedures, it might still be necessary to apply some form of local anesthetic. The sedation reduces certain thresholds of pain, but won’t turn your child into a superhero. The pain signals being sent from the tooth to the brain still need to be blocked. If your child is getting their teeth cleaned, obviously anesthesia is not necessary. On the other hand, if they need a root canal or a tooth pulled, it will be used.

Sleep dentistry is just one way we’re trying to accommodate for our young patients with developmental disabilities. We encourage you, as a parent, to utilize any of our extra features if your child has a mental health disorder. We want to be on the frontline when it comes to these issues. We don’t want to ignore them. Instead, we’re here to bring them to light, shed as much information on them as we can, and provide as many accommodations as possible!