Dental Fears and Phobias

Ambling along an innocent-looking road, you pass a sign for a dental surgery. Immediately, your heart starts racing, you can feel the heat rising to your face, and you become shaky and nauseous. Argggh, not yet another reminder of the dreaded D-word - better cross that road and face the other way! Is that you? You may be one of the many people who suffer with dental phobia!

So what IS dental phobia?

A "phobia" is traditionally defined as "an irrational severe fear that leads to avoidance of the feared situation, object or activity" (even though the Greek word "phobia" simply means fear...). Exposure to the feared stimulus provokes an immediate anxiety response, which may take the form of a panic attack. The phobia causes a lot of distress, and impacts on other aspects of the individual's life, not just their oral health. Dental phobics will spend an awful lot of time thinking about their teeth or dentists or dental situations, or else spend a lot of time trying NOT to think of teeth or dentists or dental situations. Which is pretty hard in today's society

Whether the fear is "reasonable", "unreasonable", "excessive", or "irrational" is debatable... but not if you are placed in the hands of the wrong dentist! Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why people end up as dental phobics in the first place..

"Easy" vs "Hard-core" Phobics?

With the help of the right dentist, some phobics find that their fears dissipate extremely quickly, while for others, the phobia remains an ongoing struggle. Interestingly, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between this and the degree or intensity of your phobia (or scores on dental phobia tests, for that matter, with the exception maybe of scores on certain subtests).

Some people may be scared, or even scared to death, but will respond well to efforts designed to put them at ease. Others find that no amount of TLC or behavioural strategies will eradicate their fears, but there are dental professionals available who are trained to deal with such phobias. If you reckon that dentist behaviour explains little or none of your fears, you may want to look into sedation dentistry.

Types Of Sedation