Do you hate the dentist?

Do you hate the dentist?

Throughout my career I have found that the greatest battle for patients is overcoming their fear or anxiety of the dentist. “I hate the dentist!” is often how I am greeted, most often shortly followed by “no offence!”. None taken, we’ve just met so I seriously hope that it is not personal otherwise I may need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

It’s the dental treatment you hate, not the dentist. This usually stems from historical treatment that was either painful or pretty uncomfortable. This can sometimes be accompanied by a grumpy and uncaring dentist making the whole experience fairly poor. Dentistry as a profession has come on leaps on bounds in the last few decades and it continues to advance at a huge rate thanks to increased research and development along with technological advances. Dentistry, and us Dentists, are more than aware that a visit to the dentist can fill you with dread but we also know that the experience should be painless and not cause nightmares or sleepless nights.

The most common fears will be the expectation of pain, needle phobia, the noises, the sensations of a dental drill and the fear still lingering from a previous “bad visit”. The advances mentioned before can greatly help to reduce your fears and hopefully make them vanish in time. For example, modern dental anesthetics should be highly effective and thus eradicate any feeling of pain during a dental procedure. Even the administering of the anesthetic should be relatively pain free with the use of topical anesthetic gel, something your dentist may refer to as numbing gel. Some dentists may own a device that will self administer the anesthetic in a very slow controlled manner so that it is highly effective to the single tooth you are having treated but more importantly can barely be felt. This will go a long way to help you overcome your needle phobia.

The fact will then follow that if you have adequate numbness of the area you should feel no pain and nothing to fear. But the noise is horrible? Sounds like nails down a blackboard? Modern dental drills are becoming more and more quiet making them more tolerable but even then you should take along your music MP3 player and listen to this to help relax you and take away the noise.

These are all wonderful ideas and will most definitely help but the main thing for you to find is a dentist you trust and one you feel comfortable with. This should go without saying but dentists are only human and we all cant like everyone. It important to do some research not only online but more importantly from word of mouth speak to friends and relatives to ask if they have a dentist who they use and recommend. It will go a long way to making you feel happier about your visit in the chair.

There are no treatments in dentistry that should be associated with pain, including root canal therapy and wisdom teeth extractions, although post operatively these may bring some discomfort, your visit to the dentist should be pretty much without pain. If a patient comes to me initially petrified of what is to come, I see that as a challenge to prove them that it is not only not as bad as they expect but actually nothing to worry about at all. It can take several visits before this can be achieved but usually it is. If all else fails and someone is just too phobic then you can always request treatment under sedation so, under a controlled environment, you take the appropriate medications to help relax you. This though should be a last resort.

It is well known that nearly half of Australians do not visit the dentist. This is a staggering fact and one that profession has a duty to put right. I hope that with time, greater care and education people will no longer fears us as they have. We go through extensive training to get where we are and we have a professional obligation to continue our training throughout our careers. Remember we are only there to help you.

David Hurst BDS (Lon)