Safe and Effective Dental Pain Management: Best Practices in Local Anesthesia and Opioid Prescribing

Course overview

This comprehensive live webinar explores the safe and effective management of dental pain through both local anesthetics and opioid analgesics. Participants will gain critical insights into pharmacologic principles, patient-centered strategies, and risk-aware prescribing practices to enhance pain control while minimizing adverse outcomes. Emphasis is placed on clinical decision-making, individualized care, and current best practices in anesthetic and opioid use. Appropriate Prescribing Practices for Opioid Analgesics in the Dental Office Management of acute dental pain is accomplished with the use of non-opioid and opioid analgesics. However, this normally occurs outside the dental office, away from the immediate supervision of the clinician, who is often faced with the difficult task of managing patient pain while also avoiding adverse outcomes for both the patient and their communities. Thus, it is critical for clinicians to be able to accurately identify the need for pain control, individualize patient care based on this need as well as associated risks, assess the efficacy of analgesic agents prescribed and monitor for their appropriate use. This program will provide participants with an overview of the pharmacology of pain control and the effective management of acute dental pain using non-opioid and opioid analgesics. Special emphasis will be given to appropriate prescribing practices for opioid analgesics. Pharmacology and Therapeutics of Local Anesthesia: An Overview & Update Due to their potential for producing life-threatening systemic adverse reactions, a thorough knowledge of the pharmacological and clinical properties of local anesthetic agents is essential for their safe and effective use. This program will provide participants with an overview of the pharmacology and therapeutics of local anesthetic agents. Special emphasis will be given to those agents commonly administered in dental practice and patient management techniques necessary with specific disease states.