Relieving Dental Anxiety

Well, the truth is that there are so many patients that have severe anxieties. There are thousands of patients out there that somehow avoid the dentist and procrastinate and just aren’t willing to go in for regular routine care and let things break down, and all of a sudden 10 years have gone by.

Realizing that, many years ago, my wife and I decided to start committing ourselves to understanding how to help these patients, and so basically we started taking lots of courses and understanding the process of helping patients go through treatment and be completely sedated, and really the goal, what I tell patients, is for you not to remember any of your treatment.

The first visit for an anxious patient can be probably the hardest visit because we’re just … and the good thing about it is we’re just talking at that point, so we want to make patients feel at ease, that it’s just more of a conversation and getting to know the patient and understanding where are those fears coming from, because many times it can be a childhood experience. Sometimes it can just I don’t like this one part of dentistry, and it can be injections or it can be the sounds. It can be a gamut of different things.

We do try to pinpoint where that anxiety is coming from. But the bottom line is that patients usually are at ease immediately when and your dentistry will be done. we start to talk about the fact that we are able to sedate you. You won’t remember anything about your care here, so I always tell patients that the most wonderful thing about this is you will wake up at home and your dentistry will be done.

And so patients who have gone through that experience typically tell us that that’s the way I want to do it every time, because they’re all of a sudden able to erase years of neglect in say one visit or two visits. It’s a real cool thing for me. It’s probably one of the most rewarding things for me as a dentist to be able to help a patient who has been neglecting their teeth for 10, 15, 20 years, and I just see them smile confidently for the first time in a long time, is really a nice … I appreciate it a lot.