Sedating the apprehensive debilitated patients for dental procedures...

Treating apprehensive debilitated patients (i.e. geriatric patients, patients with cardiac, pulmonary, kidney, or liver diseases, and those with other severe systemic conditions) for dental procedures can cause unexpected medical complications such as cardiac arrest, stroke, asthma or shock, etc. Due to diminishing functional capacities of their organs, sedating those patients with sedative drugs in normal regular dosage could increase the risk of adverse events for this group of patients and can also increase the risk of liability for the clinician. The authors treated 34 apprehensive dental patients with a combination technique using parenteral sedation and hypnosis together with acupuncture. We used Bi-Digital O-Ring Test (BDORT) to select the compatible sedative drugs and to individualize the dosage suitable to the patient's medical condition. Oftentimes, BDORT predetermined dosage amounts to a fraction of regular dosage that is normally recommended by manufacturer for regular healthy patients. Such a reduced dosage, though benign to patient, may be insufficient to render a patient to the sedation level for dental treatment. Nevertheless, hypnosis with acupuncture can be applied to potentiate the therapeutic effect of parenteral sedation, thereby reducing the amount of sedative agents required to alleviate patient anxiety. The results indicated that hypnosis with acupuncture and BDORT could effectively allow the reduction of the sedative dosage and may beneficially provide a safe and comfortable situation for the debilitated patients to receive the necessary treatment.

Acupunct Electrother Res. 2012;37(1):49-62. Lu DP, Wu PS, Lu WI. University of Pennsylvania, USA.