Do dental visits still hurt?
For a lot of patients, dental phobias are high on their list of fears. We assume it hurts to visit a dentist, because urban legends say so, and those scary-looking dental implements don’t help. It’s tough telling someone they won’t feel a thing when they can hear the dental drill whirring in the background. Unfortunately, avoiding dentists does way more damage to your health.
Today’s dentist is driven by a need to keep your teeth and gums healthy. So they’re motivated to make your clinic visits as comfortable as they can. One of the ways dentists do this is by developing new, painless tooth technology. In this article, we’ll share some of the techniques used at our dental clinic, Maroubra branch.
Lowering the pain of impaction
What was the trigger for your first dental visit? Many patients come in for tooth extraction, root canals, or wisdom tooth impaction. And since their first visit was so serious, they assume all dental visits are like that. In all three procedures, the bulk of the pain comes from soft tissue damage. When pulling out the tooth or scraping away the rot, the nerves in your gums hurt.
Dentists sometimes use anaesthesia for these treatments, but effectiveness varies. At our clinic, we increasingly rely on laser dentistry. It allows us to work on your gums and soft tissues faster. You feel a lot less pain, and the healing process is quicker too. This second point is crucial, because many dental patients suffer more at home than at the clinic.
Reducing psychological pain
Sometimes, you hear the whirring drills and smell those dentist scents, which makes you anxious. This shift in your mood can intensify your perception of pain. Enter sleep dentistry. It’s a form of partial sedation that numbs your senses without making you fully unconscious. Meaning you could choose to sleep, but you don’t have to doze off. You’ll stay responsive.
Our dentists describe is as a ‘dream-like state’ that raises your pain threshold, meaning while the treatment is happening, you’ll barely feel anything at all. Once your visit is done, you’ll have benign amnesia, not quite remembering the (scary parts of the) treatment itself.
It offers instant recovery, so you can ‘nap’ during your lunchtime dental appointment, rest for half an hour, and be fresh enough to go back to the office and successfully complete your afternoon shift. Sleep dentistry is safe for both kids and adults, and is especially useful if you’re having multiple procedures, because you can doze off and wake up once everything is done.
To learn more about our selection of virtually painless dental treatments, call Dental Avenue Maroubra today on 02 9344 8822.
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