What is the #1 reason you go out of your way to avoid seeing a Dentist?
It’s not the sound of the drill.
While we’ve come a long way, with advanced drills and significantly reduced noise, the number one reason patients avoid dental visits is simply fear of pain. Interestingly, we are not born, or wired, to fear the dentist - for most of us, if we’ve experienced pain in the past, our brain does not want us to repeat that ordeal.
It’s the old “fight or flight” brain, in the back of our head (literally), otherwise known as the Lizard Brain - going back thousands of years to our hunters gatherers world when we were wired for basically two functions: Survival and reproduction. In a more modern interpretation of our old brain, it seeks pleasure and to avoid pain.
A simple illustration of our Lizard Brain is when we hear a very loud voice — the hormones that our “flight vs. fight” brain releases will cause us to want to run away from that source of loud noise (pain). Simple right? It is. So it is likely that at some point in your history, your lizard brain associates dental visit with an unpleasant and even painful experience. Next move? Avoidance.
Many of my patients, who have finally gathered enough strength to give us a try (or those who have neglected their teeth because of this avoidance and wind up with an unbearable root-canal type pain) confirm that their avoidance related to a previous unpleasant dental visit or visits.
While I can state confidently that I have mastered the art of injection, “wow doc, I am numb, I didn’t even realized you were done”, there is another aspect to painless dentistry - resisting the temptation to practice what we call “rollerblades dentistry” — when your dentist books three patients at the same time and winds up rollerblading between rooms. From a business standpoint, booking three patients each hour is quite lucrative but it does not allow the dentist the opportunity to spend as much time on a patient as needed.
When I first opened my practice in 1989 I made a decision to value my patients’ time as I valued my own. As I celebrate thirty years in dentistry, I am happy to share that despite tempting advice by fellow dentists and industry experts, I stuck to my commitment to personalized dentistry.
Performing a detail and patient exam, without the pressure of serving patients who are waiting in other rooms, allows the patient to relax and affords me the time to examine and practice my very slow, pain-free injection and dental procedures.
The best way to avoid dental pain is to diligently follow a dental hygiene and cleaning routine - for most patients, a detail cleaning and my personal exam every six months are sufficient. For patients who suffer from gum disease or other chronic dental issues, every three months is more common.
There is simply no reason, even financial, to avoid simple dental cleaning. Most insurance plans cover routine cleaning and x-rays and for patients without insurance, we offer our Dental Discount Plan - a yearly $199 fee that entitles you to 20% off all of our procedures.
So, if you’re one of those people who go out of their way to avoid even basic routine dental cleaning — please reconsider and remember my favorite mantra:
“Be true to your teeth or they will be false to you.”