Helping patients with anxiety is a big part of our practice. It could be as simple as coming in and seeing the same faces as one, and that we continue to take care of them in the way we do. Or people need more than that.
Sometimes they need just gas, like laughing gas, nitrous oxide, through cleaning, through fillings or crowns or extractions. Then there’s the next level of folks that need to be sedated. And that’s something we have a conversation with.
We do a separate workup on through the health history and we provide a day for them to come in, or a morning, to where they’re asleep for their visit and get all the work done they need to get done. What’s really important for an anxious patient is to kind of meet expectations that they have prior they come in. What I find in our dental office at West County Dental is a lot of times someone who has come in anxious and gone through the sedation protocols, over time they don’t need to be sedated anymore because they’re so comfortable because we’re very repetitive with the way we take care of them.
And it’s the same people seeing them. A lot of times that helps get them get over that anxiety.
