Dental anxiety Caused By Your Own Experience
The most common cause of dental anxiety is a previous traumatic dental experience particularly in childhood stages. Just one traumatic event of the dentist ignoring your pain during the dental procedure (“I am almost done”) and not stopping the procedure immediately is all it takes to cause a lifelong fear of the dentist.
Restraining children during early dental procedures was another common cause of dental fear and anxiety during adulthood. While this mentality was a common practice in pediatric dentistry in the past, currently pediatric dentists are becoming much more aware of the detrimental impact of dental fear and anxiety on their young patients. Dental schools are now focusing more on the psychology of dental fear and anxiety in their curriculum than ever before.
Dental Fear and Dental Anxiety Caused By the Experiences of Others
Sometimes all it takes to develop dental fear and dental anxiety is listening to a friend or a family member talking about their experiences: a childhood traumatic dental experience, the horrors of their root canal experience, the removal of their wisdom teeth, and painful injections.
It is important to realize that the person describing the event is telling the story in such descriptive terms to help you imagine the degree of pain and discomfort that they’ve experienced. While there may be some truth to the experience, naturally there is a considerable element of exaggeration associated with telling this type of story.
The fact is that there is no reason why anyone should experience pain during a dental procedure. If you experience pain, that means you are not numb. Even if your nerve anatomy and distribution may be different, we dentist are trained to know various techniques and methods of sedation dentistry and local anesthesia to overcome such anatomical challenges. If you experience pain, ask the dentist to stop and numb you again.