Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Extra Blog October: Novocain, would you trust me to do it?

During my summer I was able to participate in a dental experience program for USC. In that program I was able to practice injecting Novocain into a tomato. Isn't that just fun? According to the students the gum turns white when injected with the anesthetic.

First off, what is Novocain? Well actually, the proper term is Lidocaine and is more better than the traditional medicine. Some background on it is that the first widely used local anesthetic was actually cocaine.  Cocaine was first used in a dental procedure in 1884.   Prior to that, many other techniques were used, with the most common being the consumption of large quantities of alcohol before a dental procedure.  Cocaine was certainly more effective than no local anesthetic (or drunkenness), but there were many drawbacks, most notably its high potential for addiction, its short duration of action, and its effects on the heart and entire cardiovascular system.

Now there are many better anesthetics AND they're good for your health too when you have work done on you. 



Lidocaine is used by dentist as a local anesthetic instead of novocaine

1 comment:

  1. How are the anesthetics "good for your health"? Cute pic. Avoid "more better". This was interesting.

    ReplyDelete