- Reconstructive dentistry
- Dental Implants
- Cosmetic Dentistry
- Sedation
- Wisdom tooth surgery
- Gum treatment
- General Anaesthesia (GA)
General Anaesthesia (GA)
There are risks associated with general anaesthesia, so it's not commonly used for dental treatment. However, it's an option for complex dental surgery such as very complex extractions of impacted wisdom teeth, complex dental implant surgeries, young children and people with special needs. Occasionally, people with severe dental phobia have general anaesthesia so that they can receive dental treatment, but on the whole it's thought that using sedation or hypnosis are better options because IV sedation works fine for about 97% of people with a high anxiety of dental procedures and has a much lower risk.
If you have a general anaesthetic, it means you will be asleep and totally unconscious during the operation and feel no pain. You can't reliably breathe on your own, you need to have a "breathing tube" inserted. Therefore, general anaesthesia for dental treatment should only be administered in a hospital setting with critical care facilities where all the staff and doctors are professionally trained. Such quality of care is available at KLSMC (a registered hospital) for both in-patient and outpatient day surgery.
How is it administered?
GA is usually started off with an injection in the hand or arm. It can be supplemented by a face mask but if a face mask is used you probably won't remember it.
If post-op pain is expected, the normal practice is to inject a long acting local anaesthetic during the GA, so that when you wake up everything is nice and numb for a good few hours afterwards, which should give you time to take some painkillers and allow them to kick in. It's much better to preemptively stop pain than it is to try to deal with it once it has started.
