6 Reasons Why Dentists Should Have an IV Certification

As a dentist, you must have encountered many patients who react differently to the various types of dental anaesthesia you use during the operations. And pain is one of the reasons people avoid visiting their dentists for treatments that require dental operations. But you can help your clients to receive the treatment without undergoing much pain.

In this post, you will learn why you need to obtain an IV certification as a dentist to further your career. Intravenous sedation is one of the dental anaesthetics that you can use to ease the pain patients go through during the treatment process.

By becoming certified, you not only get the freedom and license to operate sedation dentistry but also help your clients with a better alternative to ineffective (or rather under-effective - according to their conditions) anaesthetic drugs.

Intravenous sedation
Image by Rebecca Moninghoff from Pixabay

Here are 6 reasons why you should seek your certification in IV therapy to enhance your dentistry practice.

1. IV Sedation is Reliable for Patients with Gag Reflex
Patients who normally suffer gag reflex cannot undergo any form of dental treatment. The general anaesthetics cannot help such patients. For this reason, many patients tend to postpone their treatment to a time when they are less suffering from the condition. In most cases, it is not easy to predict when it will calm down.

This can inconvenience both the patient and the dentist regarding the booking arrangements. Depending on your work ethics and rules, you can rebook another date with your client to come for the operation. Although this trend cannot be satisfactory for your profession either.

According to research, IV infusion calms the patients from the gag reflex condition, making it easier for the dental operation to proceed. So, if you have a patient who needs an operation and the condition sets in, you can administer the right intravenous drug to help your patients undergo treatment with no hindrances.

2. It Makes the Process Simpler
When you are carrying out a dental operation, you want to deal with a patient that is conscious and can do anything by themselves but calm. Some of the anaesthetics render the patient (almost) unconscious making it difficult to handle them. That is where intravenous treatment beats all the other anaesthetic administrations.

With an IV infusion, the patient remains conscious. It is only the feeling for pain that goes as you carry out the operation. While your patient feels less to no pain during the treatment operation, they can breathe, move, and talk by themselves.

All these help you to ease the process. You can tell them to turn or do whatever to make your exercise easier. In case they feel discomfort or pain, they will signal you through their actions or speaking so that you can adjust them or help them with whatever they need. The advantage is that you and your client have an easier time for the whole procedure.

3. IV Sedation is Much Safer for the Operations
Dentists want to give their patients treatment without any complications or causing harm whatsoever. With many of the anaesthetic methods used in dentistry, the patient is almost unconscious, which means they cannot respond or give any feedback on what they feel while you are still treating them.

The dental patients can only speak or react to the effects after you are through with the operation and the drug has subsided in their body. This can be dangerous for patients who suffer side effects or have other conditions that the dentists would want to know while they are in the process of treating their clients.

You cannot wait for the patient to wake up for you to continue the operation. When using general anaesthetic drugs, you have to act quickly and finish before the patient becomes conscious.

The infusion of intravenous drugs helps you to work on semi-conscious clients who can respond while the procedure is on. The sedation makes the treatment process more effective because you help to ease the pain when operating on the patient while keeping them awake.

Patients under IV sedation can talk with you and tell you what they feel so that you can do something to make the process easier and reduce the suffering of the operation. Obtaining your IV certification will help you to administer the IV sedative drugs appropriately to make your profession a better experience for you and your clients.

4. Intravenous Sedation Promotes Quick Relaxation
The worst problem to deal with during dental treatment is stress. A stressed patient can give you a hard time to operate on them or administer any form of treatment. And you will most likely meet the dental patients in the situation because of the pain they are already suffering from or the fear of the procedure you want to carry out on them.

Intravenous injections give the patient a quick calming effect that helps them to settle and give you an easier time for you to treat them. First of all, the drug gives a fast effect because it enters the bloodstream directly via an injection.

The drugs also help in calming down the patient’s stress while still leaving them awake and conscious enough to let you carry out the treatment operation. The relaxation effect takes place almost immediately you induce the drug into the patient’s blood.

5. IV Has Less-serious or no Side Effects
Some patients have shown common side effects of general anaesthesia when they undergo treatment. Some patients can experience nausea and vomiting while others can have severe side effects like blood clots. The conditions can be dangerous for carrying out dental treatment procedures. In the case of nausea, the patient has to wait until they feel better before the operation commences.

While waiting, the patient may be overtaken by the drug and become unconscious and make the process even harder. Or, in some cases, the patient can only recover from the side effects when the drug has subsided from their blood. This can worsen the case because of the use of the drug without successful treatment on the patient.

Patients who exhibit signs of side effects can go for IV infusion. The advantage of the intravenous treatment is that it has no side effects. In cases where they appear, they are not as serious as the general anaesthetics. Patients can receive their treatment easily without delay or postponement.

6. You Are in Full Control of the Situation
One problem with anaesthetics is that you can easily give a heavy dose that can make the patient go unconscious for a long time. In other worse cases, the side effects can be too heavy to manage on your client. You can, therefore, easily ruin your day and that of your patient with inappropriate drug administration in the process of dental treatment.

In this case, the intravenous infusion makes the experience better and more effective. First of all, considering that the patient is semi-conscious during the operation, you can easily tell if the drug was sufficient or not. And since the drug gets into the blood faster and has a quick action, you can know almost immediately after the infusion.

dentist-detal-care-machine
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
Another advantage of the IV infusion is that you can adjust the drug by adding some until you get optimal results for the procedure. You can, therefore, easily measure an amount that works well for your patient for the particular treatment you are going to carry out on them.

It is also notable that the effects of intravenous drugs subside faster when compared to general anaesthetics. You will have no reason to worry when your patient will be okay to get up and go. And because they are semi-conscious, you can tell how much the patient would take to completely come into their full consciousness.

You can also measure the success of your treatment easily. This gives you more confidence over your work knowing that your client will be happy at the end for successful operation with minimal to no pain and side effects.

Summing Up
Intravenous therapy gives you more confidence and success over general anaesthetic administrations during dental treatment. But as a dental practitioner, you should obtain your certification before you can use the treatment method on your patients.

You may need more skills that you did not get in your dentistry classes. And that is why it is advisable to go for further studies to obtain your IV certification. The course may cost you some money during the short duration, but it is worth it for your future dentistry endeavours.

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