Ok. So finally I am giving in. Everyone, including my staff, my wife, my friends, even my kids is telling me to start writing a blog. Anyone who knows me well, knows that me and writing goes together exactly the same as me and talking – not a good match. Two things that just absolutely can’t coexist. But if there are several things that I am passionate about and can definitely write about, they’re: health, nutrition, dentistry and sports.
With that in mind, I started writing down some questions that our patients ask me and my hygienists on regular basis. Today I will start covering some of them.
This question is actually the one that I ask my patients. I usually ask this before administering local anesthetic: “What did you have to eat before your visit today?” Unfortunately, the answers that we hear are not the ones that we would hope for. It’s usually “nothing really”, “coffee and muffin” or “bowl of cereal”, “soup and sandwich”. You get the idea. We all love and crave some processed carbs like bread, cereal and pasta. Unfortunately, those are not the best choices when it comes to pre-dentist visit meal. We want your pre-local anesthetic meal to serve several purposes. I will cover some of them today and will address the others in my next blog.
- Helping our bodies deal with increased stress levels. As any other medical procedure, dental treatment does induce additional stress on our bodies. Each one of us already deals with everyday issues that cause stress like helping your kids with homework without either one of us ending up in a body bag (can you hear me screaming right now?). Daily stress is a pretty heavy task that we ask our body to deal with. With that in mind, one of the means to help anyone to combat additional stress is to make sure we provide ourselves with proper nutrients to be able to do
- Keep you satiated for at least 3-4 hours. We don’t want you to be starving right after a long dental procedure and chew half of your lip up while trying to eat your lunch or dinner. Trust me, it does not look or feel good after the numbness wears off. Ingesting a meal that is high in processed carbs will fill us up initially but will make us very hungry shortly after, like we never even ate.
And for not having any meal at all before dental procedure that requires local anesthetic, I don’t know about you but I can’t go without some type of food for more than 3-4 hours. So, being hungry right after long dental visit, is just not a very good strategy to have.
That should do it for today. While you digest the information and try to make sense of it, I will continue adding to the list and will publish the remainder of it in the next blog. I will also address the nutritional strategies then.
