Find Out What We Can Do for Your Anxiety
If a patient told me they were scared of the dentist, I’d say, “That’s a lot of people,” because it is a lot of people that have had bad experiences in their life, and those experiences stay with you. I mean, it’s hard to break that type of experience, and we understand fear, and we have ways to deal with that here.
We’ll have some patients that will come in and they’ll be fearful, but we can talk to them and spend the time with them, get through the process, and they may do fine with just regular treatment because what we do is when we do treatment of patients, when we have to anesthetize people, we’ll use a pretty strong topical on the gums, and what that does is that numbs the gum before you give the local.
We warm our local anesthetic up to about body temperature because that makes a big difference when you’re giving that. We do injections slowly—that also helps as well. You can’t always make it completely pain-free, but I mean, we get a lot of patients say, “I didn’t feel that at all,” and that kind of thing, so it’s possible to have that happen, but if somebody’s really scared too, there’s other options.
We could do nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide works well for some people. We do oral sedation, that’s where you take a sedative pill before a procedure. Probably the better thing, if somebody is really apprehensive and wants comfort, is to do IV sedation, and it’s very predictable, it’s very quick. It wears off pretty quick too and the patients don’t remember the procedure. Even with oral sedation, the patients don’t remember the procedures as well, but IV’s the most predictable.