Is IV anesthesia needed and appropriate for my oral surgery treatment?

Sometimes we are questioned about the need for IV Anesthesia for treatment.  The typical concerns are for the appropriateness of care, risks of treatment, and cost of treatment.  This most often comes up when there is an urgent care need.  The patient is of course under some stress in that they have to see another doctor and they share these concerns.  We have a lot of experience in helping them in this process so that their experience is the best experience.

We work hard to schedule urgent care and emergency care patients in right away and take care of them along with our regularly scheduled patients.  We slot them in, many times in places in our schedule where “there aren’t really places”.  We do that because we want to serve you and serve you expediently.  To manage your care effectively we cannot in many circumstances manage a difficult extraction, on an anxious patient, with local anesthesia.

We have years of experience with this.  Also many cases with good intentions turn out to be more difficult than expected. Please let us do our job effectively and expediently.  That means allowing us to have you prepared for the possible need for anesthesia for the treatment. If I feel it can be done under local, we have the time in our schedule, and you wish that; we will do it. But if in my judgment the procedure warrants, I’m going to provide the care appropriately with intravenous anesthesia. This is what we are trained to do for proper, comfortable, quick and safe treatment.

This serves all of us.  We are able to perform the treatment expediently. You get treatment in a comfortable environment quickly and without pain. Patients are typically very happy to have received proper care comfortably.  This discussion did not even touch on the fact that most patients, who come here for care, when given the options choose to be sedated for care.

I hope that this discussion helps with the understanding of how we as oral surgeons practice. We want to serve you and your needs. We want to do it with excellence and with proper care and comfort.