The nation’s leading educator of dentists who practice oral conscious sedation has told a committee of the ADA that its proposals to revamp the guidelines for OCS will exponentially push up the cost of dental care, especially for fearful and anxious patients.

In its official submission of comments to the ADA’s Committee on Anesthesiology (Committee H), the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation (DOCS) notes that “rather than protect public oral health and expand quality dental care to large numbers of individuals, the [committee’s] proposals will have the exact opposite impact.”

DOCS, which represents 3,300 individual practitioner members, is the largest body of practicing OCS dentists in the world.

Repeatedly in its filings with the ADA, DOCS noted that the Committee H proposals will ratchet up the both the time and cost dentists will have to expend to continue administering OCS to their patients. 

The price will rise, DOCS notes, because the extra expense will be passed along to patients.  Moreover, many dentists will discontinue offering OCS in their practices altogether because they will not be able to justify the higher investment, leaving their patients without care.

DOCS wrote that there is “not a scintilla of evidence” to support the need for the extensive increase in required training that Committee H is seeking to impose on the profession, noting that “there has been such an exemplary record of safety with millions of cases using the type of sedation taught under the existing guidelines.”

Another trigger for higher costs, DOCS said, is the Committee H requirement that dentists remain in the same room with the patient the entire time, even when the patient is minimally sedated and attended to by other qualified and trained staff members.  Unable to even check in on other patients, the dentist will have to “increase fees considerably for this service.”

Under the proposed guidelines, even an emergency patient who shows up at the dentist’s office could not be seen so long as the dentist was required to remain tethered to a sedated patient.