TAC 20 gel, Profound gel, and the Baddest Topical in Town are all compounded dental anesthesia products available to dentists from our pharmacy. There weren’t always so many options though. Painful teeth have always been a problem and there have been different methods throughout history to make their removal less painful. Usually it’s much more painful to keep a tooth than to remove it. Herbs, flowers, and alcohol have been used to numb an area for surgery. The methods of anesthesia we are most familiar with today only came about over the past 200 years or so. Ether was used for surgical anesthesia and other medical purposes for hundreds of years. Nitrous oxide was used in the 1800s to produce insensibility in patients. These methods didn’t work so much by numbing an area as making the patient insensible overall to pain.

Novocaine Gets Popular

The development in dental anesthesia that patients are likely most familiar with came in 1904 when procaine was first synthesized. Procaine was sold and marketed heavily under the brand name Novocaine, becoming the most popular form of anesthesia for dentists in the early 1900s. Dentists eventually noticed that patients were having allergic reactions from Novocaine and new anesthetics were developed with less risk of side effects. As these newer anesthetics entered dental offices, Novocaine stopped being used. By the 1980s it was hardly being used at all. Newer and safer local anesthetics like Lidocaine became much more popular.

Advances in Dental Anesthesia

Now dental anesthesia can be custom compounded at pharmacies like Park Compounding Pharmacy. These include TAC 20 gel alternate, Profound gel, and The Baddest Topical in Town. These compounded prescriptions often include medications in the same family as Novocaine including lidocaine, tetracaine, and prilocaine in different concentrations. Some patients need more than just the typical dose of topical anesthetic. We are able to make specialized compounds so their trip to the dentist is easier. Our TAC 20 gel, Profound gel, and The Baddest Topical in Town also can be made in different flavors like grape, mint, and bubblegum.