Relieving Your Dental Anxiety Is One of Our Top Priorities
We use a few different things to try to make patients at ease at the dental visit. We often see patients who struggle with dental anxiety. It’s a very real thing for them, and oftentimes it goes way back. It’s not something that necessarily happened recently. It may be something that happened as a child, and it’s just instilled this fear in them that they’ve always carried with them.
So we always like to sit down and talk to the patient and find out, “Okay, so where is this coming from? Is this something that happened to you recently? Is it something that happened to you a while back? Why did that happen? What did not happen that should have?” From that, we kind of get a feel for where this is coming from, and we’re able to have those discussions with the patient, “Well, okay, things have changed a lot since then. These are the things that we’re able to do so that you don’t have to worry about necessarily dealing with that again.”
Then we take the time to walk the patient through the different ways that we have to provide anesthesia to the patient, to make sure that they’re not going to feel anything through the procedure. Or if we have to use (inaudible), if we have to use oral sedation, we’ve got those options, but we try to figure out what’s going on ahead of time.
And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a procedure that the patients have. It could just be coming in the office and getting their teeth cleaned. We’ve had patients that went through traumatic events in their lives, and just sitting in the chair is more frightening to them than what you would think, so you have to walk through that.