From Volume 41, Issue 1, January 2014 | Pages 78-83
Dental anxiety can be a hindrance to treatment. It is prevalent, so helping patients to overcome it should not be regarded as the province of a specialist. Hypnosis can be effective but is underused. A comparison of the conscious, alert state and hypnosis/nitrous oxide sedation is shown by electroencephalogram examples. The benefits and drawbacks of the use of hypnosis are discussed and suggestions of ways of learning and using hypnosis outlined.
A fundamental skill that a dental surgeon has to offer to a patient is surely the anatomical knowledge and the ability to place local anaesthetic where it will remove pain sensation and enable treatment to be carried out. So why, from a patient's perspective, might this not be entirely satisfactory when local anaesthetic is almost 100% effective? There is the problem of anxiety. Even the most dentally experienced patients, dental surgeons included, admit to a degree of apprehension, but most of the time this is accepted and passed over. Consider the dentist who has a practice in a leafy suburb. The patients are well educated, well behaved, intelligent and sufficiently wealthy to provide this clinician with a comfortable income. Neither this dentist nor the patients are particularly concerned by anxiety that may interfere with the provision of treatment but it is possible that he or she has acquired all the attributes that mitigate anxiety: confidence, trust, respect, prestige, pleasant demeanour and empathy. Some of these, respect for example, need to be mutually felt by both clinician and patient. However, the anxiety scale has a vast range, from fear of needles to extreme dental phobia.
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