According to the Lake County Coroner’s Office, Corey Causey visited Dr. Aaron Swik at the Oral Maxillofacial Surgeons of Lake County facility on June 9 to have several teeth extracted. After being put under anesthesia, Causey stopped breathing and went…
The two most common methods for administering systemic medications to dental patients is by enteral (PO) or intravenous (IV) routes. In an emergency, the PO route has a slow onset of action. The drug, administered PO, needs to be absorbed…
Current nil per os (npo) standards promote pre-operative fasting as an approach to reduce the volume and acidity of a patient’s stomach contents to reduce the risks of regurgitation and subsequent pulmonary aspiration. Pre-anesthesia fasting standards apply to any procedure…
Epistaxis (nasal bleeding) is a relatively common complication that may arise during a dental visit that utilizes sedation/anesthesia. While rarely fatal, appropriate and prompt management of peri-operative epistaxis is critical in order to prevent further harm. This article will discuss…
All practitioners who deliver nitrous oxide to their patients should be intimately familiar with the relative and absolute contraindications to its administration. Relative Contraindications Nasal obstruction: Nitrous oxide sedation can proceed if despite some degree of nasal obstruction, the patient…
Abstract When difficulty in obtaining adequate mandibular anesthesia is encountered a systematic approach incorporating the evaluation of patient factors and operator technique will substantially improve outcomes. Even for the most experienced dental practitioners, consistent, profound mandibular anesthesia remains difficult to…
Pre-operative airway assessment and management is essential to successful dental treatment under procedural sedation. In the event of oversedation, defined as the transition from an intended level of sedation to an unintended deeper level of sedation, the patient’s ability to…
“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign/Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind/Do this, don’t do that/Can’t you read the sign?” – Signs by The Five Man Electrical Band A repeated discussion that I have with colleagues is that dentistry, as a…
Washington’s Dental Quality Assurance Commission has fined an owner of Must Love Kids Pediatric Dentistry in Vancouver in connection with the death of a 4-year-old Vancouver boy after a dental procedure in March 2017. Mykel Wayne Peterson died after receiving…
Autumn Ferguson went into a Regina dental clinic with a few cavities, and left in an ambulance on life support. The five-year-old girl’s lungs collapsed while receiving oxygen in the wrong way under general anesthesia, according to the surgical centre’s own admission. Ferguson’s…
A retired Edmonton dentist has to pay $330,000 related to the case of a young girl who suffered permanent brain damage following a dentist appointment nearly two years ago. Amber Athwal was four years old when she was given anesthesia for…
The Arizona dental board rejected calls from Governor Doug Ducey to take stronger action against a dentist facing criminal charges for falsifying his anesthesia credentials. At a public meeting Friday, board members defiantly called on the Governor’s Office to produce…
To view figures, click on figure mentions throughout the article. Your patient in the chair has confirmed that their lips and tongue are numb from your block local anesthesia. As you are beginning to start the clinical procedure, your patient…
Sedation and anesthesia for dentistry has come under scrutiny in the past few years due to a few tragic events where patients experienced harm. These events have raised several questions: are these just isolated incidents due to negligence in clinicians’…
Honesty is such a lonely word – Billy Joel Bias and integrity are strange bedfellows. They are two qualities that we speak of in absolute terms although there is no absolute measure for them. Both qualities force us to look…
It’s been quite a year in dental news! 2017 seemed to bring on some interesting areas of concerns for dental hygienists – whether it was health issues to lookout for, questionable acts inside the practice and, of course, the new…
The Alberta Dental Association and College (ADA&C) has permanently suspended single operator sedation. The motion was passed at a meeting on May 24, which states that registered dentists in Alberta can no longer “simultaneously provide deep sedation or general anesthesia…
Cetylite® Inc. recently designed a new flavor of one of its flagship products, Cetacaine® Topical Anesthetic Gel. Cetacaine will now feature a Cool Mint flavored gel, which will be available by mid-June. Indicated for anesthesia of accessible mucous membranes (except…
Caleb Sears was a healthy six-year-old boy in California that went to his oral surgeon’s office for a routine extraction under general anaesthesia (GA). Unfortunately, Caleb did not survive the procedure. He suffered hypoxic brain damage and he was not…
Recently the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario chose to update the Standard of Practice for the Use of Sedation and Anaesthesia in Dental Practice. While this was a semi-scheduled review (the document is revised roughly every five years),…
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