Dentophobia (stomatophobia) is a fear of dental treatment. Dentophobic patients often go to the dentist only in extreme cases, such as acute toothache or inflammation .
Today, fear of a dentist of varying degrees is experienced by at least one third of the world's population, i.e. almost every third [1]
Content
- 1 Reasons
- 1.1 Direct experience
- 1.2 Others
- 2 Ways to fight
- 3 See also
- 4 References
- 5 notes
Reasons
Direct experience
One of the main causes of fear is the patient’s personal negative experience with previous visits to the dentist. Especially if these visits were associated with any painful manipulations.
Speaking about the reasons, the peculiarities of toothache, which are inherent in particular acuity and strength, are often noted. The proximity of vital organs - the brain , organs of vision, make headache and toothache especially significant for the human self-preservation instinct .
Others
- Someone else's negative experience
Fear can be inherited. If parents suffer from dentophobia, then their behavior and emotional state can be captured and adopted by children (consciously or unconsciously) when they visit the dentist.
- Media
Negative images of dentists and dental treatment in the media, cinema, cartoons.
- Transfer of negative experience of medical treatment in other areas
- Feeling helpless and losing control
The patient is not able to control the process, this leads to a feeling of helplessness, which, in turn, causes fear.
Ways to fight
- psychological therapy ;
- the use of sedation (medical sleep) during treatment [2] to relax and calm the patient during dental procedures;
- gradual adaptation: you need to start treatment with deliberately painless or slightly painful procedures, moving on to more complex ones after some getting used to it.
See also
Phobia List
Links
Notes
- ↑ How to get rid of fear of a dentist , Dentistry.rf March 19, 2012
- ↑ How to cure all teeth in a few hours Archived May 26, 2012 at Wayback Machine , RBC May 24, 2012