For some patients achieving full local anesthesia can be difficult without the use of an intraligamental injection. Some patients may have full symptoms of a mandibular block for a lower arch or may have a had multiple anesthetic inflitrations on both the palate and muco buccal fold, but when a dentist starts drilling the patient still feels pain. Intraligamental injections can be used as a supplemental technique to achieve a pain free experience in these instances.
Intraligamental injections inolve the use of special anesthetic syringe, that can deliver anesthetic directly into a tooth’s ligaments under pressure. Usually the injection is placed at 4 corners of the tooth that requires additional anesthesia. Just a few drops per corner is all that is routinely needed and often this technique works well when other more ordinary anesthetic shots have failed.
A slight drawback to this injection is that sometimes the tooth feels sore for a day or two afterwards, since the injection was placed into the ligaments surrounding the tooth. The ligaments need some time to ‘heal’ afterwards.
