What is dental anxiety?
Visiting the dentist regularly helps to maintain oral health in the best conditions, as it also helps a lot to make a timely detection of any irregularity in the mouth that goes beyond health problems in the teeth. To give an example, during some processes, the dentist may recommend orthodontic services to provide the patient’s smile with a better appearance.
However, even though the dentist has the skills, abilities, and necessary tools to provide an excellent dental service, some patients tend to suffer from dental anxiety for specific reasons.
Signs of dental anxiety
Dental anxiety occurs when a patient, either by the noises, smells or instruments, begins to feel discomfort to the point that panic attacks may occur.
Although anxiety is an emotional state that helps us to defend ourselves in threatening situations, there comes the point when it can get out of control and cause us to act in an uncontrolled manner.
The fear of feeling pain is one reason why patients begin to suffer from dental anxiety. In the long term, this causes the patient to stop attending dental checkups, increasing the risk of suffering from any oral disease.
Some of the most common reasons why patients suffer from dental anxiety are:
- Patient’s personality characteristics.
- Past dental experiences.
- Dental experiences of family, friends, or acquaintances.
- Fear of pain, blood, or injury.
- Fear of anesthesia (one of the most common reasons).
- Lack of personal space.
Now, some are the reasons that cause dental anxiety, and some are the symptoms of dental anxiety. To timely detect a person with this condition, we must pay attention to the following signs:
- Lack of sleep: an early way to detect dental anxiety is when the person loses sleep days before the dental checkup. Being in a state of alertness, it is very common that at night it is complicated to sleep.
- Physiological aspects: the physiological elements are easier to identify because they can be noticed with the naked eye, both for the person suffering from dental anxiety and the accompanying person. These include palpitations, sweating, shortness of breath, and even dizziness. These symptoms commonly present when the patient is a few hours away from a dental check-up.
- Motor behavior: Motor behavior refers to all those maladaptive behaviors a person performs. These behaviors range from avoiding the dental act to escaping from the dental office.
Suffering from dental anxiety is serious; if you know someone who has some of these symptoms before visiting the dentist, don’t minimize the person’s reactions, as this could prevent patients from attending their appointments.
How can dental anxiety affect me?
Dental anxiety can affect you in different ways. One of the most common is when the patient prolongs visiting the dentist for too long, and problems appear in the mouth. Suppose a patient had to go to the dentist to treat a cavity. In that case, this disease will spread to the point that it begins to infect other teeth, or the tooth in question will deteriorate to the point of causing significant discomfort, and there is a risk of losing it.
Another way in which dental anxiety can affect patients is when they are forced to go to the dentist because of this discomfort. During the procedure, they start to make movements or, in other words, prevent the procedure from being carried out correctly, resulting in the dentist having difficulties and patients having a worse experience than they thought they would.
How to reduce dental anxiety
Dental anxiety is not something a patient can control overnight; it takes time to prevent these symptoms and attacks. However, there are some tips that can help you to reduce the appearance of this condition and gradually manage it.
Talking is one of the most efficient ways to deal with dental anxiety because by expressing your doubts and insecurities, patient-dentist communication is fostered, clarifying any doubts or disagreements you may have. Getting distracted can also be of great help in coping with the situation. These distractions can range from playing music to playing with an object that helps release patient tension. As if that were not enough, relaxation techniques are the most vital point to deal with this dental anxiety because the purpose of these techniques is that the person who performs them can relax and calm down so that in this way can collaborate more quickly, thus being of great help to the dentist.
At Dental Easy Care, we are aware that any patient can suffer from dental anxiety; that is why our services offer a quality that only a dentist in Tijuana can offer. From the beginning, we explain in detail the procedures that the patient must undergo, clarifying in this same way the doubts that the patient may have. Come to our clinic and see why we are the favorite of hundreds of international patients.