A dental syringe is an instrument that a dentist uses to numb various areas of a patients mouth in preparation for oral care procedures. This type of instrument has multiple parts that allow the device to produce a thin stream of a numbing agent known as local anesthetic. Syringes can be dangerous if not handled correctly.
A medical instrument used to numb the mouth prevents a patient from experiencing pain when undergoing a variety of dental procedures. For example, the anesthetic used in a dental syringe can numb the nerves in a tooth that must be given root canal therapy, which is a procedure that a dentist performs to save a tooth that has been infected. Dentists also use a dental syringe to locally anesthetize the gums prior to performing root planing and scaling, a treatment that involves scraping hard food deposits from the surfaces of the roots of teeth.