Dental Phobia: The Reasons And The Cure

Not a few people suffer from an acute dread about visiting a dentist. All manners of imagined fears seem to close in upon them especially as the date of the appointed visit approaches nearer.

These fears and anxieties people suffer are, in most cases, unfounded, or at least, exaggerated, especially in this age of modern dentistry when dental treatments are becoming increasingly ‘pain-free’.

Dental Phobia And Dental Anxiety: Is There A Difference?

To begin with, dental phobia, fear or anxiety—none of these are, strictly speaking, technical terms. However, commonly, it is said that someone is a victim of dental phobia if that person experiences this fear to an extreme and unreasonable degree when he is supposed to meet a dental appointment.

On the other hand, dental fear or dental anxiety generally refers to the worries or anxieties people suffer, to different degrees, when they need to see a dentist. According to one piece of statistics, as many as 75% of American people suffer from dental anxiety whereas something akin to dental phobia has been observed in only 10% to 15% of Americans.

However, we also need to take these statistics with a pinch of salt since the figures regarding dental fear and anxiety in people often tend to vary rather radically from one source to next. Here is another piece of stat for example that informs us that 3 out of 6 people in the US suffer from dental phobia (possibly meaning dental fear rather than phobia) whereas the numbers for Europe and Asia are 3 out of 8 and 4 out of 7, respectively. This again, in part, reflects the common confusion between the terms.