Thursday, July 17, 2008

Angie's List Poll Says 50% Afraid to Visit the Dentist

According to a news article on CBS3.com, a recent Angie's List poll found that 50 percent of their members were sometimes afraid of their dentist.

And, even if people are not happy with their dentists, they won't take the time to find a new one because it's too much of a hassle.

What I find remarkable is that despite educational efforts and the wealth of information available on the Internet, people are still afraid to visit the dentist.

On top of that, the dental industry has undergone rapid change. Gone are the days of "Civil War era" treatments. Dentists today have an array of tools and technologies that make dental treatments painless.

One of these tools is the Comfort Control Syringe -- which I talk about in the video below.

Other new techniques include one-visit crowns and sedation dentisty.

With CEREC dental crowns, a dentist can place a crown in one visit. With this new technology, you experiences significantly less invasive drilling, fewer injections, and a lot less time taken from your schedule.

With sedation dentistry, dentists have a number of options to help eliminate pain, including topical gels, improved local anesthetics, such as Septocaine, which provides profound numbing, and sedative drugs taken orally, such as Valium or Triazolam, which lower anxiety.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great points. I invite you to visit www.anestheticnews.com

Haynes Darlington M.Sc. PharmD CCPE.

P.S. resposible for bringing articaine to Canada back in 1982.
mailto:localanesthetics@yahoo.ca

Helaine Smith, DMD said...

Haynes,

I use articaine all the time. I do not understand why many American dentists don't like it. It's the best local anesthetic; I don't have to give blocks, either. It is a wonder drug.

I lecture on it and the instructors at Tufts tell students not to use it -- why is that? It's infuriating but they're the ones slinging amalgam.