A common phobia is a fear of the dentist chair and what it might entail when you walk through the door for your appointment but there are now plenty of positive reasons why you should not be able to overcome any fears you might have.

Dental practices such as www.manhattanortho.com use the latest modern methods of dentistry anyway so that your visit is as painless and pleasant as it can be and if you do have in-built fears, there are now treatments available to help you overcome that anxiety.

Facing your anxiety

Dentists understand that some patients have a certain level of anxiety about the prospect of having work done that involves things like having an injection or facing the drill and that anxiety can be heightened as they sit in the waiting room until their appointment time.

If you have a fear of dentistry you are definitely not alone and it is estimated that well over half of us have some sort of anxiety attached to dentistry-related events.

About a third of patients tend to feel a heightened sense of anxiety simply sitting in the waiting room and about seven in ten of us admit to feeling extremely anxious about the prospect of an anesthetic injection.

Negative connotations associated with a dentist is a common anxiety to experience for many of us but there are certainly some treatments and therapies available to help you face these fears and get them under control.

CBT could help

The use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one particular treatment that is proving popular and successful in helping many patients to overcome and manage their fear of the dentist.

CBT normally involves a short-term program of about ten sessions that are focused on proactively adjusting your reactions to stressful events in general, such as paying a visit to the dentist.

If you are fearful of things like the dentist the use of CBT could be very productive for you as many patients experience a vast improvement in their stress levels after just five sessions of CBT and the majority of people completing their CBT course have subsequently been able to have dental procedures without the need for sedation.

Positive experiences

The basic idea behind treatments like CBT and other methods such as hypnotism for example, is to allow people to replace and counteract the bad experiences they have had in the past with new and much more positive thoughts and associations with things like the dentist.

It is often simply a case of balancing up the books so to speak. This means that the longer you have suffered with your fears and anxieties and the more you have built up and heightened your negative thoughts, you will probably need to build up a balancing measure of positive thoughts to allow you to conquer your fears and anxieties.

All dental health professionals tend to understand that many of us can experience anxious thoughts about letting someone go to work inside our mouth and they want you to have a positive experience, however you achieve that goal.

Samantha Finch is a dental student with just 1 year of university left to complete. She hopes to alleviate her patients fears when they are in her dental chair but until that time comes she blogs on a range of dental topics for health related blogs.