Dental professionals understand that many people have a fear of the dentist. These fears are usually rooted either in a bad childhood experience or a general fear of the unknown. Because we treat so many children and clearly remember being children ourselves, we have come up with a number of strategies to alleviate fear of dentists in young and old alike.
The first thing we do is educate every new patient to minimize his or her fear of the unknown. We begin with a complete dental examination and explain in simple terms the problems that we discover. We have seen that the more we explain things to our patients, the more we demystify dental practices in general
We also find that giving people a choice takes helps calm their fear of dentists. People feel strangely empowered when we provide them with more than one option to consider. We can almost always recommend several courses of action for problems we encounter.
Not every patient who comes to us wants a Cadillac solution, nor can everyone afford one. What we try to do instead is to find a medically sound, aesthetically beneficial option that fits the budget of the patient. We also have financial assistance programs to make our options affordable to people. This is often a great relief in and of itself.
We have also witnessed that people tend will lose their fear of dentists as soon as they become more comfortable with our office. We keep dental records, X-rays, photos, and insurance documents impeccably organized so we can retrieve them at will, answer questions, and determine the best course of treatment. Our staff is always friendly and willing to help, and we work hard give a strong sense of bedside manner to our clients.
Once a patient gets into the routine of our treatment procedures, we find that he or she loses a great deal of fear of the dentist due to the feeling of familiarity. This familiarity often remains localized to our office, however. We have seen a good many patients become so comfortable with us that they do not want to go to a specialist. Instead, they prefer to remain in the comfort zone of our office and have us administer the treatments we prescribe.
One of the reasons that we are so broad in our scope of services is to accommodate this desire. We offer both general dentistry care and cosmetic dentistry care to our patients so they can feel comfortable coming to us for anything.
Some individuals, however, simply cannot get past their fear of the dentist no matter what we do to make things comfortable for them. For these individuals, we offer both oral and IV sedation dentistry services. Oral sedation simply involves taking some sedatives before the procedure. For IV sedation, we can have an anesthesiologist come to our office 2-3 times per month to administer the sedative.
Regardless of the source of their fear, we urge every patient who has been putting off dental care to get treatment as soon as possible. The more quickly we can pinpoint a problem, the more we come up with a plan of action that is affordable and effective.
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