The Journal of the American Dental Association
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Providing effective pain control is a critical part of dental treatment, yet achieving consistently reliable anesthesia in the mandible has proved elusive. The traditional inferior alveolar nerve block (IANB) has a high failure rate; for example, the failure rate in lateral incisors is 81 percent. As a consequence, new approaches and techniques have been developed. The purpose of this supplement to The Journal of the American Dental Association is to determine whether the mandibular nerve block has become passé. ⋯ Pain control is an essential part of dental treatment. Alternative injection techniques and devices that can help increase the success rate of mandibular anesthesia are available.
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and Overview. The provision of mandibular anesthesia traditionally has relied on nerve block anesthetic techniques such as the Halsted, the Gow-Gates and the Akinosi-Vazirani methods. The authors present two alternative techniques to provide local anesthesia in mandibular teeth: the periodontal ligament (PDL) injection and the intraosseous (IO) injection. The authors also present indications for and complications associated with these techniques. ⋯ Dentists may find these techniques to be useful alternatives to nerve block anesthesia.
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and Overview. The limited success rate of the standard inferior alveolar nerve block (IANB) has led to the development of alternative approaches for providing mandibular anesthesia. Two techniques, the Gow-Gates mandibular nerve block and the Akinosi-Vazirani closed-mouth mandibular nerve block, are reliable alternatives to the traditional IANB. The Gow-Gates technique requires the patient's mouth to be open wide, and the dentist aims to administer local anesthetic just anterior to the neck of the condyle in proximity to the mandibular branch of the trigeminal nerve after its exit from the foramen ovale. The Akinosi-Vazirani technique requires the patient's mouth to be closed, and the dentist aims to fill the pterygomandibular space with local anesthetic. ⋯ Having the skill to perform these alternative anesthetic techniques increases dentists' ability to provide successful local anesthesia consistently for all procedures in mandibular teeth.