Sleep Dentistry

February 17th, 2009 by Mark Mutschler

Dental work while you sleep.  What a great idea!  For fearful little kids who need a lot of fillings? Brilliant!

The safest way to sedate children enough that they fall asleep is to use a special doctor called an anesthesiologist to give the sedative drugs, monitor the child and then wake them up safe and sound.  

In both our Oregon City and Portland pediatric dental offices, we use an anesthesiologist to put kids to sleep while we fix all their teeth in one visit.

How does it work? Well, most kids that need to go to sleep for fillings will not sit still to start an IV so we will usually give them a shot (just don’t tell them ahead of time please).  

This shot makes them not pay attention to what is going on around them and allows us to painlessly start an IV and keep them asleep with a very short-acting medicine.  When the dental work is done, we stop the flow of the medicine, the kids wake up in a few minutes, and are out the door in about half an hour or so.  Nice.

We traditionally went to the hospital for this kind of deep sedation or general anesthesia and we still do if a child needs special medical supervision or insurance coverage prefers hospital treatment.  

Fairly often however, a parent’s out of pocket expense is greater at a hospital that is covered by their medical insurance than the cost of an in-office anesthesiologist that is not covered by their insurance.  This is because there is no hospitalization charge.

If this sounds like something you would like to learn more about, give our Portland or Oregon City office a call.

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