Electric shock feeling with nerve block

[Floweryyghost]

When i got my wisdom teeth out only the right lower side got a nerve block and the sting was pretty intense. i never feared the dentist/oral surgeon up until that moment! I eventually need to get a tooth pulled(#19) it is half broken, and was wondering if that will happen again during the extraction or if i can ask the oral surgeon for just local?! All of my other wisdom teeth didnt need it by the way unless i managed not to feel it just the lower right one.

 

[Gordon]

It happens when the dentist gets too close to the nerve with the injection, it's impossible to see in advance where the nerve is so it can happen from time to time, going by my "hit rate" it's probably about one time in a couple of hundred, so not that common.
It's very unlikely to happen to you again, so if it were me, then I would take the risk in order to get the best anaesthesia.

 

[MagicDuck12]

@Gordon one in a "couple of hundred" doesnt sound very good.... a pilot doesnt crash a plane every 200 flights yet some lucky person gets zapped every 200 tries???

 

[Gordon]

Not sure what your point is?

 

[MagicDuck12]

@Gordon well my point is fairly obvious.... If someone is being shocked once in every 200 times that's a lot.

You say it's "very unlikely to happen".... Well it's not at those odds

 

[Gordon]

Well, you have to deposit the LA solution within 0.5cm of the nerve branch for it to work.
You can't see the area which you're injecting into, you only have some anatomical markers to go on, the needle doesn't necessarily go in a straight line from where you point it to where it ends up, there will inevitably be some anatomical variation in where the nerve actually is, which you can't know in advance because you can't actually see or feel it.

It strikes me as being a bit of a miracle that the odds are as low as 0.5% of it happening. It's also almost completely harmless (in over 40 years of practice I have never had a patient with any nerve damage following a block injection, I think the literature offers the risk of that as similar to lottery wins), you can argue about mental trauma I suppose if you really want an argument.
Since inferior dental block injections are only really required for the lower back 3 teeth in each side and even then not in every case, they are already a lower percentage of injections given in the average practice every day.