Dental Phobia

Many of our patients start out as being dental phobic. I find our experience of this really interesting:

So often people with dental phobia are so very anxious because they had an unpleasant experience or experiences during the course of a past dental appointment - perhaps in childhood.

Some of these patients have the odd problem, but very often treatment is straightforward, and happily dealt with using a kind and gentle approach, sometimes with the help of oral or intravenous sedation to reduce anxiety. To our great satisfaction, very often patients who started out highly phobic, become more and more relaxed, until they need no dental treatment other than standard maintenance, and become just like any other patient in our practice.

The really interesting group of patients are those who have been so anxious in the past that they have allowed their mouths to deteriorate into a really very poor state indeed.  Unfortunately, the situation here may often be that all the teeth are unsalvageable, need to be removed, and implants placed.

What is really significant, is that once the teeth have been removed, the phobia seems to disappear too. Our ‘dental phobic’ patients are no longer dental phobic, quite simply because they no longer have any teeth. Working on the implants is very different to working on teeth.

Perhaps this is because what is taking place in the mouth is more like ‘Meccano’ - the usual type of discomfort associated with 'live', sensitive teeth is just not there any more – The experience is totally different, and divorced from the kind of dentistry that has been experienced in the past.

I have not yet come across an implant phobic…

Tags: dentistry, phobia