Ten out of 10 dentists recommend not inhaling the drill during a routine dental procedure.
And so did at least one man in Illinois who recovered from a bad cough during a tooth -filling routine by placing a nearly an inch -long drill in the lower right side of his lung.
“I was at the dentist, had a dental implant and then, to my knowledge, I was told I had swallowed the instrument,” said Tom Jose, a 60-year-old technician. He told the Wisconsin television station WINN. “I didn’t really feel him fall. I just heard a cough. When they did a computed tomography scan, they realized you hadn’t swallowed it. You breathed a sigh of relief. “
The piece was inserted so deep into Josie’s lungs that conventional instruments failed to reach it, forcing interventional pulmonologist Dr. Abdul Alrayez to take a more creative approach.
Using a small robotic bronchoscope, usually reserved for sampling suspicious tissue inside the lungs, Alrayes was able to remove this piece very carefully. The operation, performed at Aurora Medical Center in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was successful.
“I couldn’t be happier than when I opened my eyes and saw him smile under this mask while shaking a small plastic container with furniture inside,” Josie said.
Although this story is shocking, there is no reason for him to stop you from visiting the dentist.
Dr. Edmond Hewlett, a consumer advisor at the American Dental Association and a longtime professor at the UCLA School of Dentistry, told HuffPost that dentists are trained to pre -determine which elements to place in the oral cavity.
These elements often include a carious tooth or even an inappropriate crown. They are easily caught in so -called rubber dams – thin pieces of rubber that act as a barrier to the rest of the mouth (and throat) – and then removed with a suction cup or a small pair of tweezers.
“It doesn’t happen often,” Hewlett said. “And we’re ready for it”.
Regarding exercising and then inhaling, Hewlett acknowledged that any medical procedure has risks. In this case, he said, it appears to have been exacerbated by a “sad simultaneous cough.”
(If you need to clear your cough or sore throat during dental work, there will be no harm to your dentist before doing so.)
Industry data on how often this happens doesn’t really exist, Hewlett says. But he pointed to a 2004 study in the Journal of Dental Education that found that over a 10-year period that included 100,000 patient visits to a large dental education institution, there were 36 cases of ingestion or craving for a small dental matter. .
In these cases, 25 were ingested, one was inhaled and 10 were lost and never found in the patient.
“These are the dental students who are studying dentistry,” Hewlett said of the size of the study. “We don’t give them the right to treat patients until they have significant skills, but they are still interns.”
Hewlett encouraged anyone afraid of the procedure to talk to their dentist in advance and ask about anything that isn’t clear.
“With these common methods,” Hewlett said, “I know that the equipment, tools and technology we use are very effective in preventing the kind of accident that happened to a patient in Wisconsin.”
Source: Huffpost
