Does your dentist allow 15 minutes or more for you to become completely numb before they begin treatment? Does your dentist also allow enough time for good dentistry? At The Center for Special Dentistry® a typical office visit is scheduled for 90 minutes.  This video on Good vs. Bad Dentistry. Part 8. Time & Novocaine created in our Dental Anxiety Dental Fear office.

Hi this is Dr. Jeff Dorfman at The Center for Special Dentistry in New York talking about 12 ways people can differentiate good from bad dentists and good from bad dentistry. An important thing you need to consider is does the dentist allow enough time to take care of you. This is a much bigger problem today with the great rise in managed care. The reason why that is a problem is because of the fee reimbursements coming from managed care, the dentists are not given enough reimbursements to spend enough time with patients. They may have to turn people over in a 30 minute visit—that’s a problem! At this practice, at the Center for Special Dentistry, we do not belong to any managed care plans, and here’s one really good reason why: number one, getting numb, novocaine. Sometimes that can take 15 minutes to really begin to take an effect, particularly in the lower jaw. It’s not that much different, the anesthetic, than if you’re meeting your friend out for a glass of wine after a crazy day at work. If you have a little sip of wine, you don’t feel relaxed. It may take until you’ve had a half a glass of wine 10-15 minutes later that you finally go like, “Ahhhh,” and you feel more relaxed. Novocaine is the same way—it takes time. You can’t give somebody 15 minutes to get numb if you only have 30 minutes for a procedure. In this practice we schedule extra time for anesthetic to take effect before we begin, and another reason we schedule extra time is that in about 10% of my cases, I find that I needed significantly more time than I actually anticipated. I don’t usually need it but sometimes I do, and for that reason, here we actually schedule all of our patients with extra time. You do not want to go to a dentist who you feel is rushed and does not have enough time for you. This is Dr. Jeff Dorfman at The Center for Special Dentistry.