Helping Our Patients Over Come Dental Anxiety- Patient Story

Attention nervous patients! Attention nervous patients! I was once one of you and it still amazes me that the team at Alexandra Dental Care have turned me into someone who now feels able to attend for regular check-up’s and treatment.

My case of dental phobia – and of needles in particular – had grown gradually more extreme, and was having a negative effect on both my physical and mental wellbeing.  Having not visited a dentist regularly for over a decade, minor issues with my teeth were allowed to escalate until the pain became excruciating and I was forced to go to an emergency dentist.  In the end I was reduced to patching up my own broken and decaying teeth with temporary filling material from the pharmacists, leaving me unable to eat anything other than the softest of foods.  From a mental health perspective my phobia was also having an effect.  The condition of my teeth, and the knowledge that I would eventually have no option but to see a dentist was constantly on my mind.  I would be forever checking my teeth in the mirror, and poking about at them both at work and at home.  I developed a stammer, which would surface when talking about dentists, as well as a nervous tremor.

It was clear something had to give, and I began to ask around, both through friends and on the internet, to find a dentist who might be able to help me as by this stage I considered myself a hopeless case.  One name kept coming up – Dr Yogi Savania.  As a rational thinker, the only way I felt comfortable even thinking about approaching a dentist was to satisfy myself I was choosing the best in the business.  Even after deciding that Yogi was the only dentist for me, it took me 18 months to pluck up the courage to phone the surgery, and as they will be able to vouch I stuttered and stammered through the story of my dental phobia.

To this day I don’t fully understand why I finally made that call, or how they persuaded me to make the next step of booking a consultation.  Making that first visit felt like a real accomplishment for me despite displaying terrible nerves.  I was always worried that any dentist it chose would fail to understand why I was so scared, or would make me feel silly for having left it so long.  However, Yogi was so reassuring it made me wish I had taken this step years earlier, even though it was discovered that I did require some extensive dental treatment.  In previous negative experiences I have been treated by dentists who made me feel like a test subject, whereas Yogi made me feel like part of the team.  He not only explained, he listened.  He told me how at any point I felt I needed him to pause the treatment I could signal and he would stop.  He would periodically stop to make sure I was okay, and to advise me how relax and even how to breath normally to help achieve this.  This might sound simple, but in my past experiences dentists did not do this, and I was amazed.

The next big step came after two or three visits – a local anaesthetic for a crown preparation.  My dental phobia had been improving with every visit as I built an implicit trust in Yogi and his team, but my fear of needles remained.  I have had painful experiences of this in the past and was literally rigid with fear as Yogi went about his business.  The next thing I knew Yogi was saying “we’ll just wait for that anaesthetic to take effect”.  I didn’t fully comprehend those words at first. Hang on; has he already stuck the needle in?  I hadn’t felt it.  I took quite some convincing he had done so, but for the rest of that session, with the scary part over, I was so relaxed I almost fell asleep!  That convinced me beyond all doubt that I was being treated by a dentist at the very top of his profession.  I left that day with a huge sense of achievement, and thinking to myself how great the feeling was of casually visiting a dentist for treatment – just like a regular guy!

Okay, I lied a bit in the first paragraph when I said I used to be a nervous patient, as to a certain extent the fear will always be there. However, what Yogi and his team at Alexandra Dental Care have done is enable me to control my fear, rather than my fear controlling me.  Not only has my dental health improved as a result, but so has my quality of life as I now feel more confident in general without my phobia being constantly in the forefront of my mind.  It’s amazing the difference choosing the right dentist can make, and if you are nervous then taking the step of picking up the phone and calling Alexandra Dental Care could do the same for you.

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