Sydney,
I understand what it is like to live with chronic pain. I know how miserable life can be when you dread living because of it. However, I also know from personal experience as well as professional, what can happen when someone submits themselves to treatment out of desperation and doesn't ask questions. A practitioner should always inform their patient of what the treatment is, what the short and long term goals are and what the adverse reactions could be. Not only will it give you some perspective on what to expect, but the information could be life altering to you in the case of an unexpected emergency situation. In an emergency, one of the first questions a medic or the ER asks is.... "What drugs are you taking?" Your dental treatments may or may not be contradictive to something that you'd be given in an emergency. But the only way to be safe would be to know what your dentist is injecting you with.

As a surgical assistant for the last 30 years, I have seen people who were injected with Lidocaine <and some other local anesthetics> go into hypotension (abnormally low BP), hypertension (elevated BP), seizures, abnormal heart arrythmias or lose consciousness. This can occur at any visit that a local anesthetic is given, not necessarily at the first one. There are a variety of factors that can cause this to happen and it can occur with even the slightest dosage.

Not all dental offices do this, but we place a pulse ox monitor on all patients receiving dental treatment from the minute they get in the chair until they get up to go home for the simple reason of being able to continually monitor their vital signs. Why is that important? One reason is because the gums are very vascular which means that they contain many blood vessels which are very close to the surface. These blood vessels serve as an expressway to all major organs including the heart. So any by-product of infection or anything that is injected into your gums travels through these vessels into your organs. Many people think that the anesthetic solution stays local to where the injection was given. The medication does not evaporate, it has to leave the body somehow and it does so through various organs.

Sydney, I understand that you feel desperate and you want to feel better! I think it's great that you have such confidence in your dentists and in all probability, they are trying to help you. But as part of the big picture, do you think it would be wise to know what they are injecting you with?

Please understand that I am not trying to interfere or deter you from continuing your dental treatments. I am furnishing you with this information with the absolute best of intentions.

Bryanna