Adult oral conscious sedation patients in Minnesota who need to use the bathroom anytime after they’ve received their initial dose of medication can now count on their dentists coming into the restroom and even individual toilet stalls with them.

Makes no difference if the dentist is male and the patient female or vice versa. Effective March 19, 2007, qualified dentists – not trained (same gender) members of their staff – must remain at all times with a patient who is still under the effects of oral conscious sedation (OCS).

The new regulation raises all order of potential bathroom embarrassments. If a dentist needs to use the bathroom once an adult patient has received sedation, the dentist by law must take the patient with him (or her).

This is no joke.

In fact, it has dentists in Minnesota facing a real quandary of how to manage patients during what are often multi-hour treatments using oral conscious sedation. Prior to the new regulations, male dentists routinely sent a trained female staff member to accompany female patients to the bathroom or felt safe leaving a trained staff member with the patient while they made their own restroom stop.

This is no longer permitted in Minnesota.

Although no official group is known to monitor how often dentists or their patients typically make a trip to the loo during an oral conscious sedation procedure, some dentists in Minnesota report that roughly one out of every two extended-treatment OCS patients do at some point request the use of the bathroom.

No dentist contacted in the state can recall any incident arising from the previous practice of same-sex, staff-accompanied bathroom visits, yet members of the Minnesota Board of Dentistry could not be dissuaded from approving what is believed to be the nation’s first “gender-neutral” regulation covering bathroom usage by dental patients.

Although the Minnesota rule seems absurd on its face, the American Dental Association has proposed similar guidelines and other states are weighing their own regulations that would force dentists to double as bathroom monitors.

The goal in Minnesota, like that of the ADA, in the opinion of TEAM 1500 is aimed less at protecting patients – none of whom are known to have been injured under the prior system -- and aimed more at making general dentists navigate an increasingly difficult regulatory obstacle course if they wish to administer OCS.

The rules specify that dentists must remain with their patients at all times once the patients receive oral sedation medication. The regulations don’t specifically include or exclude bathroom visits. The real intent, it seems, was to prevent dentists from tending to more than one patient at a time – thus imposing an economic “tax” on those dentists who practice OCS.

In Minnesota, as on the ADA’s Council on Dental Education and Licensure (CDEL), those proposing the guidelines and making the rules are predominately oral surgeons and other dental specialists who themselves won’t have to follow the new bathroom etiquette (because they typically have shorter appointments or don’t offer their patients OCS).

While one of the patient benefits of OCS is that previously fearful and anxious patients find they have little memory of their dental office visits, in Minnesota that could change. Patients aren’t likely to soon forget – nor relish -- such a grand intrusion on their personal privacy.

Some OCS dentists in the state are pessimistic that the Minnesota Board of Dentistry – dominated as it is by oral surgeons and other specialists -- will retract the new regulations now that they’ve been approved.

But members of the Dental Board and the Minnesota State Legislature which oversees it,  no doubt have spouses, children and neighbors who one day may need to be seen by an OCS dentist who won’t want to be “seen” by that dentist in the bathroom. The rule is ludicrous and the Minnesota Board of Dentistry undoubtedly has not heard the last from the public on this issue.