Dr. Isabelle Farmer is a practicing dentist at Houston SmileDocs in Texas. A graduate of Texas A&M University and the University of Texas Dental School, she went on to start her dental practice in 1984. In this article, she talks about how patients can reduce their anxiety at the dentist’s office.
When a patient has anxiety about visiting the dentist, that is something he should definitely tell the staff when making an appointment. By letting your dentist know that you’re worried or nervous right away, it’s something that can be addressed and fixed rather than something for you to be anxious about.
From the dentists’ point of view, it helps provide a relaxing atmosphere where the patients know that they are going to go numb and that the doctor won’t proceed unless they are already numb. That trust issue has a lot to do with the fear for many patients.
Now, for patients who are fearful, we have a number of medications that we can give them to help get over their initial fears. At our office, it’s not uncommon to have patients come in and tell us they are fearful of having dental work done. So for the first two or three appointment we will give them some medication to help relieve their anxieties. But then, after a few appointments, they begin to realize that the dental work is not as bad as they thought it was going to be, and once that happens, many patients often realize that they don’t even need those medications anymore. They have gotten to the point where they know it’s not going to be that bad and their anxiety is basically gone.
Anticipation can oftentimes be worse than the actual appointment or procedure for many patients. In fact, anticipation is a big problem for a lot of people. If you are anticipating that something is going to be really bad, that anxiety alone can make it difficult to come see the dentist. But once you know that it’s not going to be as bad—that you have experienced it, you’ve lived, it’s not that bad—patients over time will relax and they will get a lot better at coming to the dentist on a regular basis. But that’s what you have to do as a patient—you have to get over your fears and make an appointment. You have to start somewhere. So that’s why the medications that we use are helpful in getting people over that initial hurdle.
An example of this is that we have one lady at my practice who had avoided the dentist for years. She had badly decayed front teeth—almost to the verge of losing them. (We were able to save them in the end, however.) But when we started working on her, we needed to use an anti-anxiety medication called Halcion along with nitrous oxide. By the time we were finished with a few appointments, however, she refused all medications except for the local anesthetic. She said, “You know what, I just don’t have my fear anymore, because you’ve never hurt me, so I don’t have any reason to be fearful. And you’ve always told me if something was going to hurt even a little—you’ve always warned me. You’ve never surprised me. So nothing has really hurt like I thought it might.”
The other side of that anxiety issue, too, is that a lot of those patients are in pain to begin with, so it’s hard for them to imagine that fixing their problem isn’t going to be even more painful. Of course, the opposite is actually true. What we’re going to do is we’re going to get them out of the pain they’re currently experiencing. And a lot of those patients are so thankful that we’ve helped them—without causing any additional pain or anxiety—that they basically get over their fears quickly. They say things like, “I walked in with pain, and you didn’t cause me any additional pain.” Those patients just start to feel better and have less anxiety simply because they don’t feel that pain anymore, which makes it much easier to make additional appointments with their dentist in the future.
The information in the article is not intended to substitute for the medical expertise and advice of your healthcare provider. We encourage you to discuss any decisions about treatment or care with an appropriate healthcare provider.
