This question is about dementia, and we deal a lot with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and that’s why it’s so important to find a dentist that could come to your home.
So the next question is, how do we deal with the dementia patient?
When it comes to dementia, we want to find out if the patient is on medications for dementia, we want to know if the patient who the caregivers are, because ultimately speaking, we’re going to be communicating about treatment and diagnosis with the caregiver. We want to make sure we know who the power of attorney is both medical and financial and once we’re there we want to know who’s going to be there with the patient so that not only are we communicating with the patient, but more importantly we’re also communicating with the loved one who’s going to be helping diagnose and treatment plan for this patient.
That’s number one.
When it comes to the dementia patient for extractions, we want to make sure we are isolating just that one particular tooth. We don’t want to do a whole block when it comes to making the patient numb. There’s a really good chance that patient is going to be unaware that they’re numb, they might start biting their lower lip, there could be some, a lot of complications involved, so we can provide a special injection where we just go around that one particular tooth, so that one tooth alone will be extracted. It is incredibly easier to be able to do it that way, the patient is more comfortable, and all around there’s less trauma involved.
We would like to add that we put in a medicine that coagulates the blood so we never leave a patient bleeding. Even if we have to be late for the next patient (so that’s why we’re late sometimes) we make sure that patient is comfortable before we leave their home.
