How many times does a dentist usually stick you with novocaine?

To make sure you weren’t in pain. Novocaine doesn’t work the same for everyone. I remember when I was younger, I had to have nine shots before they were satisfied I wouldn’t be in pain. They kept poking my mouth and asking, “can you feel this?”, and I could every time. Better safe than sorry, though. :)

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The last time I had novocaine, I was given a shot first so that I wouldn’t feel the novocaine shots. Now, that’s a thoughtful dentist.

Did they at least do the spray-on novocaine so the shot wouldn’t hurt so much?

personally i dont think novacaine shots hurt at all. at the same time, i have an extremely high tolerance to novacaine for some reason, so the fact that i needed 15 shots when i got a root canal wasn’t so bad.

I’m trying to remember what the most shots I ever got was, but I never thought to count. Definitely less than 7. I think I generally need 3 or 4 depending on the kind of work they’re doing, though I know I had one bad cavity-filling session where he kept twanging the nerve. I have such a phobia about them hitting a nerve so hard I jerk or clench my jaw… that is no good when someone has an active drill in your mouth.

I usually only remember two, but my dentist uses a pre-treatment that make the anesthetic painless – plus he doesn’t use Novocain, which makes people sick.

I’ve never had more than four, and that was spread across two or three hours for one miserable filling. For some reason, hitting the regular injection sites doesn’t work very well for me; I got almost all of my fillings while only partially numb.
The present dentist has upgraded from Novocaine to something else that works like Novocaine ought to, and before my root canal. Best investment EVAR.

@Nullo you probably have backup nerve paths like me. Regular injections never seemed to work until one dentist figured it out. Gotta knock out both left and right sides, no matter which side needs fillings. A Ligamaject works too. That really gets down deep and knocks out pain to one tooth at a time. My root canal was totally painless when the endodontist got that going!

Zero, None, nada…. Unless you are living in 1947, the drug is Lidocaine.

@UScitizen You sure? I’ve only ever seen Lidocaine in topical anesthetics.

@Nullo yes novocaine isn’t used that much these days. Lidocaine is the first line local anaesthetic of choice.

The Xerox effect, eh?
What’s the stuff that’s supplanting Lidocaine, then?

@Aesthetic_Mess 6 times! Holy crap that’s a lot… at least to me anyway. What were they doing that they had to give you that much anesthetics…. ripping out all your teeth! I always only get 1 shot, even when i was having a tooth pulled.

@daytonamisticrip They were doing fillings. It was more than six times, I lost count after the sixth one. it still hurts

What are you like half immune to the affects of novocaine!
Just relax your mouth for a couple days and eat ice cream. The coldness will numb your mouth for a little while.

@daytonamisticrip It happens. Either weird nerves, unusual placement, or who knows what. I used to hate getting fillings even more than public speaking.

I would very much doubt that it’s the injection site that hurts today. I always have multiple shots of pain killers (more for work on the upper jaw than the lower), partly because the dentists that I use tend to be ultra-conservative about using too much pain killer (whatever they use) and it takes a long time to have the desired effect on me.

But I’ve never, ever, had pain the day after a dental procedure from the pain killer injections. Not once. Residual pain from the procedure, oh yes! but never from the injections.

When you had the fillings, did the dentist take care that none of the new fillings is interfering with the occluding tooth when you bite together? By that I mean, does any part of a tooth now touch its opposite tooth because of the filling, and where it didn’t touch before? That can cause a lot of pain, if the dentist left a “proud” tooth, even if it seems like an insignificant touch.