There is an Interrelationship Between Pain and Sleep

Seeking continuing education can help enhance your dental practice and improve the lives and well-being of your pain and sleep patients.

We require both pain and sleep for survival, but the chronic impairments in the systems of our bodies that regulate pain and sleep can negatively impact the health and well-being of our patients. What we know is that sleep complaints are present in up to 88% of chronic pain disorders. In fact, at least half of people who suffer from insomnia also experience chronic pain. Making matters worse, both chronic pain and sleep disturbances share physical and mental health comorbidities including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and depression. And in the time of the pandemic, those comorbidities can increase a person’s risk of developing severe COVID-19.

But as we continue to navigate the ongoing pandemic, we have gained a better understanding that obtaining quality, restorative sleep is vital for coping with the world around us. In 2015, the National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America poll found that one in five Americans suffer from chronic pain and report substandard sleep quality. To add to that, one in four people with chronic pain also have a sleep disorder. This bidirectional relationship is why it is clinically important for us as dentists to assess sleep quality for all patients living with chronic pain and vice versa.

At Ben-Pat Institute, we have a particular continuing education course that will provide you with information on how to properly treat your patients and help them prioritize sleep while minimizing pain. This four-part series on pain and sleep will help dentists to better understand oral appliance therapy for dental sleep medicine and pain from temporomandibular disorders (TMD). In this series, dentists can learn the anatomy and neuroanatomy as it applies to pain and sleep while also obtaining skills to perform a comprehensive examination for those patients.

Dentists will also learn how to diagnose the various TMD and orofacial pain conditions and how to manage them. Additionally, dentists will learn how to get paid for their services, and how to build a pain and sleep practice. It takes a team to establish proper care for our pain and sleep patients. Take the next step in caring for your patients by completing continuing education in the area of pain and sleep to ensure their health and well-being, especially as we attempt to find an end to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.