PRODUCT:

Onpharma^® Anesthetic Buffering System

SOURCE:

Onpharma Inc.
Los Gatos, Calif.
877-336-6738
onpharma.com

After spending countless hours experimenting with the best way to give a painless injection, I got decently good at it; however, no matter how much topical anesthetic I used to keep patients from feeling the needle, they always felt the sting of the acidic local anesthetic (pH 3.9) as it went into the tissue. I know you can give Citanest^® Plain (DENTSPLY Pharmaceutical; York, Pa.) — which has a neutral pH of 7.4 — as an initial injection, and then follow it with some Cook-Waite Marcaine^® (Carestream Health Inc.; Atlanta, Ga.) to avoid the sting, but that doesn’t seem practical for infiltrations, for example. I also believe in efficiency, so I love the STA device because I can anesthetize a single mandibular molar, set down the syringe and start prepping.

When Dr. Mic Falkel from Onpharma called me to tell me about his anesthetic buffering system that he said would allow me to inject any anesthetic at a neutral pH to avoid the sting, I was ready to order it. But I was really sold when he mentioned that buffering the anesthetic created 2,500 times more of the active form of the anesthetic than when it was at its original pH of 3.9. Rather than having to wait the typical eight to 10 minutes for the body to convert the anesthetic to the active form on a lower block, injecting the buffered anesthetic will let you know if your block is working within a minute or two.