Dentists that treat children estimate that approximately 20% of these kids are unable to accept routine dental care procedures due to lack of cooperation. It is further thought that this figure will increase due to a change in parent rearing practices. More kids are raised in households where both parents work out of home and diets of children have been filled with dental cavity-causing foods and liquids.

Most dentists today were trained in a dental setting where children were screened so that behavior was not an issue. In many post doctoral pediatric dental programs, the use of sedation and general anesthesia is often relegated to the hospital setting. Therefore, if the general dentist today is unable to treat a child needing dental care, a referral of this child to a kids dentist often results in the child being treated under general anesthesia. Few offer kids oral sedation in their office as it is not readily taught in today’s dental schools.

The general dentist or kids dentist that does utilize orally administered sedative drugs in combination with laughing gas finds that it can be a great adjunctive therapy in treating the unmanageable child when dentistry procedures need to be performed. The use of kids oral sedation in the dental office with today’s modern medication and state of the art techniques has made dental treatment more affordable and less of a risk than general anesthesia at the hospital. The need to train general dentists that treat kids in the use of pediatric sedation dentistry could not be more apparent.

Pediatric sedation dentistry is not at all like the scene in TV show or a motion picture where a kid given a drink with something in it and immediately the child is asleep and unable to be awakened. Many dentists and parents seem to think this is the case. It is not. The child will develop an altered level of consciousness in which there is increased relaxation occurs which facilitates the dentist’s ability to provide proper dental treatment.