I’d want to see a correct report before saying anything more in specific. A “local anesthetic” (e.g. Novocaine) isn’t sedation. However trying to get a 2 year old kid to let a dentist pull a tooth, even WITH Novocaine, is like, well, pulling teeth.
More caution may be worth it for certain populations. Science could continue on so as to be able to determine what those populations are. This is lives being talked about, after all. In an age when it’s easy to be so cold about abortion, I would be leery of other movements that go in parallel directions.
We would not be against requiring any Dentist who only put down a few sentences in an incident where a patient died under sedation be required to make a full narrative report. Frankly, I doubt they'd allow that in the investigation that would follow such an event. Certainly the authorities in the local jurisdiction would not accept "a few sentences" in their investigation.
My mother who had been a member of her local hospital's auxiliary had been in the recovery room waiting area one day distributing coffee to people waiting for their loved ones when the she saw a surgeon who had just finished doing a tonsillectomy on a three year old girl approach her parents who were patiently waiting for the results. He walked up to them and said "She died!" As the mother fainted, he then coldly turned around and walked away. The father barely caught his wife before she hit the floor.
Writing a few sentences about the event that involves a patient dying under the your care during a routine procedure strikes me as being as coldly dismissive as that surgeon.
Working with children is very problematical. One of the issues is the doctor does not want to instill dental phobia in the child for his later life. For that reason it is often desirable to use a hypnotic which does not allow the child to recall the events of the dental visit at all, which is far better than remember the pain of even the injection of Procaine or any other numbing agent in the mouth. Even the looming face of the dentist can be very frightening to a child.
The fact is that the expected rate of mortality from anesthesia is 1 for every 10,000 administrations of anesthetics. . . and that includes it being administered by anesthesiologists in the best of all possible venues. One in 10,000 people receiving it are going to die. There are about 40,000 dentists in California. . . and about 10% of those are licensed to administer sedation. If each of the licensed Sedation dentists in California were to sedate 5 patients per day, 20,000 patients would be sedated every day in California. Assuming a 5 day work week (although some of them do work on Saturday, it's a minority), that's about one million sedation procedures per year by dentists. . . yet you don't hear about approximately 100 people dying in dental chairs due to anesthesia which would be the expected number.
What I suspect we are seeing here in this article is an attempt by the Anesthesia doctors association in California to drum up more business for THEIR doctors.