Out of the operating room and into the dental chair: using desensitization to treat dental patients with IDD without general anesthesia is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of adult services and community participation, clinic sessions and day-to-day service delivery. In Out of the operating room and into the dental chair: using desensitization to treat dental patients with IDD without general anesthesia, for this course, the practical stakes show up in safe, humane intervention that respects health variables and daily-life feasibility, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Tennessee Association for Behavior Analysis
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →The operating room and general anesthesia have long been the acceptable and safe solution for medical and dental procedures, with death resulting in 1:250,000 instances (Messieha 2009). Adults and children who present challenging behaviors and exhibit anxiety may have trouble cooperating with procedures, and it can be challenging to treat them in an office setting, leading to the use of general anesthesia (Rapisura, Alanes, Maher, & Lu 2023). The challenge of treating any individual with IDD in the operating room is twofold. Provider availability and cost are both barriers identified in the literature as to why, according to the NSCH, 19.4% of children in the US have special healthcare needs and have unmet healthcare needs (Rapisura, Alanes, Maher, & Lu 2023). It is also documented that the unique medical needs of individuals with ASD cost 4.1 to 6.1 times that of typically developed individuals (Matton & Romero 2017). Additional concerns are postanesthetic behavioral changes, which are hypothesized as the brains of individuals with autism being unable to deal with the oxidative stress placed upon them by general anesthesia (Matton & Romero 2017). These procedures can be and have been completed without general anesthesia. Desensitization procedures, defined by McMullen, Mahfood, Francis, & Bubenik as "Systematic desensitization is a conditioning procedure in which the participant is repeatedly exposed to anxiety-causing situations while practicing a replacement or a response incompatible with anxiety-related behavior." can remedy the above-mentioned challenges. Data shows that through desensitization procedures performed by a BCBA in a dental setting at the Lee Specialty Clinic, patients with IDD are not only able to complete routine and invasive dental procedures, but they are also able to complete them without general anesthesia or restraints. Participants will review desensitization procedures, data showing OR desensitization results, desensitization resources, and future directions of desensitization treatments.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Brandon Franklin is a board-certified and licensed behavior analyst in Louisville, Kentucky. He has worked in the field of behavior analysis since 2011, providing services in the community, school districts, and medical settings. Brandon is currently Founder for Franklin Developmental Health Consultants, Chief BCBA for the Lee Specialty Clinic, and a Ph.D. student at Cambridge College, where his area of concentration is the desensitization of adult dental patients while gaining assent.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
256 research articles with practitioner takeaways
252 research articles with practitioner takeaways
You earn CEUs from a dozen different places. Upload any certificate — from here, your employer, conferences, wherever — and always know exactly where you stand. Learning, Ethics, Supervision, all handled.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.