Put Dental Anxiety Behind You With Our Help
There’s levels of anxiety, right? And those that are truly extreme anxieties, there are things like nitrous oxide or prescribing some medications that can put them at ease as long as they have a driver. More times than that, it doesn’t take long. Once you get them comfortable, once you get people trusting in that you have their best interests in mind, a lot of those anxieties disappear. So even patients that come in full of anxiety at the get-go, and maybe we have to use nitrous oxide for the first two or three or four visits, well, eventually, they don’t need it. Once they know that we have their best interests in mind and we’re not “hurting them,” a lot of it goes away.
And we don’t have a huge list of highly anxiety patients. But again, I think it’s just the environment that we create here. You know, whether it’s Luna being the dog in the back room on Tuesdays, and they sense, “Oh, a dog,” and that’s their comfort piece. Any sort of distraction. Or whether it’s the girls just sitting there talking to them about life, and they just start to settle into the chair and just become more and more comfortable. And the more anxious somebody is, you take them slow. You don’t take somebody who’s anxious and work on seven teeth on the first day. You do what you have to do that day, and you pause, and you make them realize, “Okay, that wasn’t necessarily fun, but that surely wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.” Well, do that to somebody a couple of times, and that whole feeling of anxiety goes away pretty quick.