Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Patients do not want to experience pain during their dental treatment. Fortunately, local anesthesia forms the backbone of pain control techniques in dentistry. Local anesthetics are the safest and most effective drugs for the prevention and management of pain, when used properly. (The subject of local anesthetic toxicity will also be reviewed) Yet, on occasion, achieving profound anesthesia painlessly can be challenging. In this course, we discuss the means to make dental local anesthetic injections both more effective and more comfortable. Topics include: articaine; buffering (the local anesthetic ‘on switch’); phentolamine (the local anesthetic ‘off switch’), and computer-controlled local anesthetic delivery (C-CLAD).