Update on medical emergencies in dental practice and on local anesthesia: key messages from Dr. David Isen

Dr. David Isen

On April 10, 2014, Dr. David Isen delivered an all-day continuing education course on medical emergencies in dental practice, and on advanced local anesthesia for dentists for the Ottawa Dental Society. At the end of the course, Dr. Isen briefly summarized for me the key takeaway messages that he communicated during his course. That summary is captured in the video embedded in this post (the video is just over 2 minutes long). The course was very well attended and the feedback from attendees was very positive. Dr. Isen is a very accomplished presenter.

With regard to medical emergencies, Dr. Isen’s key takeaway messages were:

1. Know and understand your patient’s medical history and its implications for the dental care you provide.
2. Particularly with anxious patients, employ a stress reduction protocol in your office, to help put patients at ease.
3. Be familiar with the contents of your medical emergency kit & how to use them. Make sure the kit is well organized and that none of the drugs are past expiry date.

With regard to local anesthesia, Dr. Isen’s key takeaway messages were:

1. Consider minimizing the use of local anesthetic with vasoconstrictor, especially when injecting into inflamed and infected areas.
2. Make sure you regularly update yourself on your knowledge of bony anatomy and of neuroanatomy, and understand the potential accessory innervation of the structures you operate on.

For concise information on medical conditions and drugs that have implications for dental treatment, please visit our Oasis Help site.

Finally, we would like to promote the concept of you (or a designate in your dental office) regularly taking an “Oasis Moment” – it just takes a moment to stay up to date with content on Oasis, and it just takes a moment to share content (ideas/photos/suggestions for resources and news) through Oasis.

In the spirit of the Oasis Moment, I have two requests of you.

1. Can you please share any stress reduction protocol you employ in your dental office?

2. Can you please do as I have done with Dr. Isen and use your iPhone to capture concise, good quality, short videos that would be of interest to professional colleagues across Canada and that we could share through Oasis?

Please explore the “Upload Your Content” section of the Oasis Discussions site and of the CDA Oasis app and use it to share your content with us. When you share content with us, or when you post comments at the end of Oasis articles, they don’t go “live” immediately without being moderated by our team. All input from you comes directly to our team and we treat your input with great respect.

Your shared content will be what makes CDA Oasis truly unique, truly Canadian, and very useful in everyday clinical practice.