Making You Comfortable with Safe and Effective Sedation

Whether it’s you or a loved one who needs to have oral surgery, you want it to be a comfortable, anxiety-free and safe experience. When choosing an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, you certainly want a surgeon who is skilled surgically, but isn’t the quality, sophistication and safety of the anesthetic just as important?

While many different methods of anesthesia are offered in our community, from taking a long-acting sleeping pill to a variety of IV anesthetic drugs, the best and safest sedation technique is one that can be adjusted up or down to meet your individual needs and stopped when it is no longer needed.

Anesthesia is definitely an art that requires experience and finesse to create that smooth, comfortable experience you so desire. It is with the same exacting philosophy Dr Grellner used in creating a better wisdom tooth experience, that he developed the innovative and exciting Grellner QuickRecover IV Anesthesia technique.

This anesthetic technique is the result of years of work by Dr. Grellner in creating a better, more sophisticated approach to short-duration* I.V. general anesthesia. (* “short duration” refers to the use of ultra-short-acting IV medications that make it possible to make dosage adjustments as needed during the procedure for better control and a significantly faster recovery. An educated consumer will quickly realize that this sophisticated control is impossible with “anesthesia” by pill.)

Dr. Grellner is one of perhaps a handful of oral surgeons in the United States with such extensive experience using the ultra-short-acting narcotic that makes this anesthetic technique possible. You will want to have this QuickRecover Anesthesia when having your wisdom teeth out.

Why do we offer General Anesthesia?

Fear

There are many patients who either fear the unknown, or have fears that arose from bad experiences in their past (frequently in their childhood).

For others, though certain procedures can be comfortably performed using local anesthesia only, they would prefer to be completely unaware of the procedure. Our QuickRecover Anesthesia is perfect for those who just want to sleep through the procedure, then wake up when it’s done and be driven home.

It is uncanny, though, how sometimes, when a patient wishes to be asleep for what is expected to be a relatively uncomplicated procedure, the procedure inevitably turns out to be more difficult than expected due to factors that could not be anticipated. Our unconscious, emotional intelligence can be very accurate, so we have learned to listen to it.

For procedures that can potentially involve surgical difficulties that are more difficult to perform or require multiple uncomfortable injections that may not be tolerated well, we will suggest that the patient (fearful or not) consider being asleep; this is especially beneficial for the fearful patient.

GENERAL ANESTHESIA IN DENTISTRY

Oral and maxillofacial surgery in the U.S. is a specialty of dentistry that involves training in a hospital setting. This training not only includes rotations through medical and surgical specialties, but it also involves anesthesia training in the operating room under the supervision of anesthesiologists.

OMFS’s are the only surgeons (that I know of) that receive this training. It is a privilege, not a right, that we hold dearly because of the significant benefit that it provides you, the patient. Upon graduation from our programs, we will have performed hundreds of general anesthetics, thus we can be licensed by the states in which we practice to provide it.