There Is No Excuse For No Dental Care

I have been practicing clinical dentistry and been on this planet long enough to have heard every reasonable excuse for avoiding dental care. I have yet to hear a good one.

Our dental practice in Maryland has successfully treated thousands of phobic, anxious, mentally challenged, autistic, and medically compromised patients. We’ve been able to accommodate infants through Alzheimer's patients. What I have learned is whatever the reason given for avoiding the dental office, there’s always a way to overcome the problem.

Are you afraid of the dentist? Perhaps walking through the office will calm you down, or learning more about the treatment using videos or demo models will make you less afraid. If it doesn’t, we can prescribe pills or liquid drugs that you can take right before your appointment. If you’re even more apprehensive, you can also take an oral sedation pill before going to bed the night before your appointment, and be treated with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) to relax you during treatment. Other options to deal with anxiety include behavior modification, hypnosis or acupuncture.

If your loved one is an infant, or is mentally challenged, autistic, or suffers from Alzheimer's, they can also receive effective dental treatment. Intravenous sedation can be offered in an office setting, or these patients can be treated in a hospital or surgical center operating room. There, the patient is totally asleep while all the needed work is being performed, and has no recollection when they awake.

An extremely anxious patient can also be treated in this manner, with the advantage that work that would take several visits to the office can be successfully performed in only one visit to the O.R.

If you cannot come to the office due to mobility issues, age, or medical complications, dentists with portable equipment can come to you, be it in a nursing home, private home, institution, or in-patient facility. Mobile vans are fully equipped to handle most dental problems. Mobile teams use hand-held x-ray units with self-developing films or laptop instant imaging systems to diagnose problems. Portable x-rays with protective radiation barriers, are coupled with mobile dental carts, and provide the same dental procedures available at the office.

Whatever reason kept you or your loved one away from the dentist, the road back is readily available and easier than you think! Over the past 36 years our practice has successfully performed over 30,000 oral sedations in our office. 3% of the time oral sedations at our office couldn’t be done, or failed due to autism, severe combativeness, or major medical concerns. Those patients were able to receive treatment, safely and successfully, with the help of an anesthesiologist in a hospital operating room.  

Whatever excuse I hear for someone not going to the dentist, know that there’s always a way to overcome it. What is not acceptable are the complications resulting from the lack of dental care – from bad breath to infections that start in the mouth and threaten your health.