What medications does your dentist really need to know about?

As a dentist, there are very few medications that really change anything we do.  Blood thinners and bisphosphates are nice to know for surgery but we rarely change anything or take you off of them.  One study showed almost 1% of patients that were taken off of warfarin DIED! Wahl 2000 JADA  SSRI and other antidepressants, and proton pump inhibitors are linked to slightly higher chance of dental implant failure. Immuno-suppressive drugs should ideally be halted if have active infections.  Steroids also impact healing, so doing any surgery we need to know this.

However, for day to day dental care non-selective beta-blockers are the only thing that might change what we do.  Some docs may not use epinephrine with this class of drugs, although that is more of a theoretical risk than real risk.

Lithium users can’t take NSAIDs and warfarin users can’t take some anitfungals.

List non-selective beta-blockers

Betapace, Betapace AF, Blocadren, Corgard, Hemangeol, Inderal, Inderal LA, InnoPran XL, Levatol, nadolol, penbutolol, propranolol, Sorine, sotalol, Sotylize, Timol, timolol

Beers criteria for medications with side effects that impact dentistry