subject: What Could Be Causing Your Dental Phobia And How It Can Be Treated [print this page] Dental phobia can be basically defined as an excessive and unreasonable fear of dentistry and procedures in it. True, there has been some controversy about the semantic accuracy of the term, where conservative commentators expressed the opinion that the fear is, in most cases, quite reasonable (seeing how painful some dental procedures can be) and typically not quite excessive. Yet the truth of the matter is that many people are haunted by what can only be described as dental phobia (statistics put this at least a tenth of the whole adult population), a phobia which is often sees them unable to garner the courage to find dental attention for minor problems - which inevitably deteriorate into major dental hazards in need of major and often risky surgery.
If you have identified, in your mouth, a small dental problem, which you are sure will turn into quite a serious predicament; but which you have been unable to see a dentist about for fear of what the dentist 'will do to you,' then there is a very great possibility that you could be having in yourself a dental phobia.
Your dental-phobia could be due to a number of causes. It could be, for instance, due to stories you heard from other people regarding experiences they had with dentists. Your dental-phobia could also be due to the effects of the widely held stereotype of dentists as 'pain causing' rather than pain alleviating medical practitioners, which is propagated by the media. Your dental phobia could also be due to previous bad experiences you had in a dental setting (like where a tooth extraction became too painful or led to other complications). Identifying the cause of your specific case of dental phobia is one of the keys to getting a treatment for it - seeing that the phobia is in this case an illness of and by itself, besides the actual dental problem whose treatment it may be hindering.
Having identified yours as a case of dental phobia, the next course of action would be to have it treated, because as we have seen, it can lead to failure to seek dental attention to very basic dental problems which can then grow into major health crises. In the treatment of dental-phobia, behavioral therapies work well (and this goes beyond the domain of dentistry, into psychology and psychiatry). In severer cases though, the behavioral therapies might have to be used alongside medication, but generally the prognosis, that is the outlook, for people looking for treatment of dental phobia is good. The behavioral therapies employed in treatment of dental phobia are those that have shown good efficacy at fear management. Medication employed in getting rid of dental phobia to make it possible for the patients to undergo various essential dental procedures include sedatives and anesthetic agents, so that a patient who is utterly afraid of dental procedures might more willingly submit to them if told that they will be carried out under general anesthesia.
