Dr. Nammy discusses how to lower dental anxiety, including connecting and forming a relationship with patients in order to get at the root cause of the anxiety, allowing patients to be able to relax and be comfortable at the dentist.
One of the most important thing that I can do in order to lower anxiety with patients is, number one, build a relationship. What that really means is really connecting and really figuring out what’s the root cause. A lot of times, a lot of the dental anxiety comes from past experience of if somebody has been on a papoose board, or if they’ve had a bad experience, what have you, or if something they’ve visually seen, their mother lose her tooth when she was 20, something along those lines; so really figuring out where does that fear stem from.
Once we can figure out where the fear stems from, what we can do is steer it away. What that means is we have a number of ways, we could use journaling, we can do NLP techniques, we can do a number of things in order to really disassociate from that fear so that we can get present and we can get comfortable so that we can make dentistry an easy part of our lives and also something that we can go through on a regular basis.
