When you tell anyone in healthcare that “sedation” to the point of coma is given in dentists’ and oral surgeons’ offices every day, without a separate anesthesia professional present to give the medications and monitor the patient, the response often is disbelief.

“But they can’t do that,” I’ve been told more than once.

Yes, they can. Physicians are NOT allowed to do a procedure and provide sedation or general anesthesia at the same time – whether it’s surgery or a GI endoscopy. But dental practice grew up under a completely different regulatory and legal structure, with state dental boards that are separate from medical boards.

In many states, dentists can give oral “conscious” sedation with nitrous oxide after taking a weekend course, aided only by a dental assistant with a high school diploma and no medical or nursing background. Deaths have occurred when they gave repeated sedative doses to the point that patients stopped breathing either during or after their procedures.

Oral surgeons receive a few months of education in anesthesia during the course of their residency training. They are legally able to give moderate sedation, deep sedation or general anesthesia in their offices to patients of any age, without any other qualified anesthesia professional or a registered nurse present. This is known as the “single operator-anesthetist” model, which the oral surgeons passionately defend, as it enables them to bill for anesthesia and sedation as well as oral surgery services.

Typically, oral surgeons and dentists alike argue that they are giving only sedation – as opposed to general anesthesia – if there is no breathing tube in place, regardless of whether the patient is drowsy, lightly asleep, or comatose.

The death of Caleb Sears

Against this backdrop of minimal regulation and infrequent office inspections, a healthy six-year-old child named Caleb Sears presented in 2015 for extraction of an embedded tooth. Caleb received a combination of powerful medications – including ketamine, midazolam, propofol, and fentanyl – from his oral surgeon in northern California, and stopped breathing. The oral surgeon failed to ventilate or intubate Caleb, breaking several of his front teeth in the process, and Caleb didn’t survive.

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Six-year-old Caleb Sears:  His death was preventable

I’m not a pediatric anesthesiologist. Most of us in anesthesiology – even those who take care of children in the operating room or the ICU every day – probably will never give anesthesia to a child in a dentist’s or oral surgeon’s office. So why should we care what happens there? Dental anesthesia permits and regulations, after all, are under the authority of state dental boards, not medical boards.

The reason we should care is that healthy children have died under anesthesia in dental office settings, children like Marvelena Rady, age 3, and Caleb Sears, age 6. Unfortunately, they aren’t the first children to suffer serious complications or death in our state after dental procedures under sedation or general anesthesia, and unless California laws change, they won’t be the last.

In 2016, officers and past presidents of the California Society of Anesthesiologists (CSA) have made multiple trips to meetings of the Dental Board of California (DBC) to discuss pediatric anesthesia. We’ve provided detailed written recommendations about how California laws concerning pediatric dental anesthesia should be updated and revised. We’ve explained in testimony before the Dental Board, and in meetings with lawmakers, why we believe so strongly that the single “operator-anesthetist” model (currently practiced by dentists and oral surgeons in many states) cannot possibly be safe.

The DBC on December 30 published new recommendations for revision of California laws pertaining to pediatric dental anesthesia, posted them on its website, and sent them to the Senate Committee on Business, Professions, and Economic Development. But these recommendations ignored many of our concerns, and don’t go nearly far enough to protect children.

Further, the DBC cites statistics claiming that pediatric dental anesthesia is currently safe. But there is no database! The Dental Board has admitted to discarding records after review. They have reported on “only nine” recent cases involving death, ignoring other tragic cases of permanent brain damage and prolonged ICU admissions. Pediatricians in California recently surveyed 100 of their members and found that 29 of them — nearly one-third — knew of patients in their practices who had experienced adverse events in a dental office.

What is a single “operator-anesthetist”?

You may never have heard of a single “operator-anesthetist” because such a thing doesn’t exist in medical practice.

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You may have read about the recent tragic deaths of two healthy children – Marvelena Rady, age 3, and Caleb Sears, age 6 – in California dental offices. Unfortunately, they aren’t the first children to die during dental procedures, and unless things change, they probably won’t be the last.

State Senator Jerry Hill has asked the Dental Board of California (DBC) to review California’s present laws and regulations concerning pediatric dental anesthesia, and determine if they’re adequate to assure patient safety. Assemblymember Tony Thurmond has sponsored “Caleb’s Law”, seeking improved informed consent for parents.

On July 28, I had the opportunity to attend a stakeholder’s meeting at the Department of Consumer Affairs in Sacramento, to hear a presentation of the DBC’s report, and to be part of the delegation offering comments on behalf of the California Society of Anesthesiologists (CSA). We hope this is the beginning of some long overdue upgrades to the current regulations.

By long-standing California state law, dentists and oral surgeons are able to provide anesthesia services in their offices even for very young children or children with serious health issues. They may apply for one of four different types of permits for anesthesia:

General anesthesia

Adult oral conscious sedation

Pediatric oral conscious sedation

Parenteral conscious sedation.

But the route of administration – oral or intravenous – isn’t the point, especially for small children, and oral sedation isn’t necessarily safer. Sedation is a continuum, and there is no way of reliably predicting when a patient will fall asleep. Relaxation may turn into deep sedation, and deep sedation into a state of unresponsiveness which is equivalent to general anesthesia. Oral medications have led to deaths in children, sometimes even before the dental procedure has begun or well after it has finished. There’s no logic in California’s lower standards of emergency equipment and monitoring for procedures done under sedation as opposed to under general anesthesia.

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