Why do you have such anxiety and negative feelings about going to the dentist? Why suffer through the anxiety and pain if you don’t have to? What kind of solutions are available?
The stress and anxiety associated with the dentist are real! They should not be ignored or belittled. This kind of stress has been proven to have detrimental consequences on your emotional and physical well-being.
The reasoning behind these feeling are very valid and so are the solutions. Both adults and children are finding relief from the stress of the dentist with safe IV sedation brought to their New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont dentist.
Dental Trauma
The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute article titled, “Trauma, Terror, and Toothpaste: Exploring Memories for Dental Visits Across a Range of Patient Fear”, highlights why adults and children have negative feeling about going to the dentist.
Memories of traumatic dental care are remarkably vivid and tend to have lifelong implications, we make the following recommendations based on our study’s results.
First, dental practices should universally screen every patient at every visit for dental fear on a simple 0–10 scale.
Second, for fearful patients (4+ on the 0–10 scale), dental professionals should inquire about prior negative experiences at the dentist, acknowledging and validating the patient’s experiences.
Third, the dental staff should partner with the patient to plan an approach that minimizes situations evoking the primary vulnerabilities underlying the patient’s prior experiences (i.e., staff should listen for themes of uncontrollable, unpredictable, dangerous, disgusting, and untrustworthy events and actions).
Finally, dental healthcare providers should diligently enact the plan, providing an opportunity to disconfirm cognitions that these themes are endemic and unavoidable when seeking dental care.
Don’t Compromise On Safety
It is important to have a specially trained and certified nurse anesthetist bring safe hospital-level sedation to your dentist’s office. A nurse anesthetist will have the proper training, experience monitoring all the patient’s vital signs, fully up-to-date on all related safety protocols and have an established emergency procedures, this will allow the dentist to focus all his/her attention on your child.
