How To Get Rid Of Dental Fear For Good? Are You Afraid of the Dentist?

Dental fear is basically the fear of visiting a dentist and receiving dental care from him or her. Although the official term for this fear is dentophobia, the majority of experts think that this is not really a phobia, but it is rather considered to be a post-traumatic stress disorder. The reason for this is the fact that people who have dentophobia do not suffer from problems and fears they cannot avoid or reason with.

The truth is that unreasonable fear of any kind is really bad for your psyche, as it can create real health problems if left untreated for a long time. On the other hand, dental fear will show effects very quickly, as it is enough for you not to see your dentist for a year or so in order to start experiencing real dental problems. As a result of this fear, thousands of people all around the world are suffering from very bad toothaches and are leaving the cause of these aches untreated, which only brings them more and more troubles.

I am 26 now and I have a really bad case of dental fear. When I was a kid, one day my tooth started hurting. It was Sunday, so my mother took me to the only dentist on call in my town. This was a short man in his fifties and with no sense for comforting children in pain at all. Aside from his lack of tactfulness, he also didn’t give me an anesthetic, so I was basically left to pull through all the pain without any help. Despite this, I wasn’t afraid at all because I had an idea that it wouldn’t hurt... I was very wrong, and I found that out as soon as he put the shiny tool for pulling out teeth inside my mouth.

The funny thing is that dental fear has been present in my life for more than 15 years, and I’ve realized some basic rules of how it works. The longer the time between each visit to the dentist, the bigger my fear is. Now, it is important to say that I’ve always found a way to overcome the fear when it was necessary to visit the dentist. However, it happened that almost five years passed between two of my visits to the “chair from hell”. When I finally had to go and face my worst fear after the five years have passed, I was petrified. However, a very interesting thing happened – my first visit after the five years was totally painless, so my fear began to become less and less intense.

The case with me is the following – my fear of dentists and dentistry becomes more intense if I spend a lot of time without visits to the dentist and when my visit to the dentist goes badly. This is why I let myself avoid the dentist for almost five whole years and this is why I’m having really bad dental problems today. Thanks to my fear and my not going to the dentist, I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia and spent the last three months in horrible pain. After three months, I went to my dentist, who is a friend, so that he could recommend me a good doctor for my health problem and he made me sit in “the chair”. After just a few minutes, he gave me a local anesthetic and he fixed two of my teeth. After this, the pain which was killing me for several months and which was thought to be caused by the trigeminal neuralgia disappeared altogether and I now have to fix just a few more teeth before I can say that all of my teeth are healthy.

The point is that you should never let your dentophobia rule your life! I ignored my teeth for some time, which turned out to be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made regarding my overall health. No matter how great and unbeatable your dental fear might seem, there is always a way to overcome it and try to make yourself comfortable in the “chair from hell”. After all, you will always be given an anesthetic and you can always count on your sanity to make you realize that this is the right thing to do!