{"id":136,"date":"2011-01-31T22:04:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T22:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/dental-advice\/do-not-blame-yourself-for-your-dental-fear\/"},"modified":"2019-06-14T12:03:40","modified_gmt":"2019-06-14T11:03:40","slug":"do-not-blame-yourself-for-your-dental-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/do-not-blame-yourself-for-your-dental-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Not Blame Yourself For Your Dental Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It still surprises me when someone new comes to see me for an examination or consultation at my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/\">Edinburgh Dental\u00a0 Practice<\/a> how often they start our conversation by apologising for the \u201cstate\u201d of their teeth or for not having attended a dentist within the last 6 months, year or even longer. What\u2019s even more surprising is that people who are anxious or scared\u00a0 are often the most apologetic. The tone of these chats also makes me believe\u00a0past experience, the advice of friends\u00a0or something else\u00a0has led these\u00a0\u00a0people\u00a0to believe\u00a0 that they are somehow going to be \u201cjudged\u201d by the dentist when they do attend. Or reprimanded for the condition of their mouth and teeth.<\/p>\n<p>If I had a bad experience and was as a result scared\u00a0of the dentist\u00a0 it would make me want to avoid repeating the process. It is a natural instinct and genuinely \u00a0nothing that you should feel the need to apologise for. Humans have finely tuned mechanisms to deal with stress or past unpleasant experiences.\u00a0And one of the\u00a0foremost\u00a0 mechanisms\u00a0is learning to avoid\u00a0situations that have not gone well in the past.\u00a0 For example, how many times did you as a child touch something that you were told was hot and would burn your fingers?\u00a0&#8230;.not more than once or twice I bet&#8230;&#8230; Exactly, this is classic\u00a0self preservation \/ learning in action.<\/p>\n<p>So I can understand why people feel this way about their dental anxiety. Often their friends or family are able to attend for dental care. So the anxious or phobic person can often\u00a0feel that somehow their fear is something they should just be able to \u201cget over\u201d. When they struggle to do so they feel ashamed and often assume that as time goes by their teeth have to be deteriorating. (An Interesting side note here is that\u00a0in my experience \u00a0many anxious patients look after their teeth extremely well to \u201ccompensate\u201d for not attending the dentist and often have very healthy mouths.)<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d suggest instead that anyone who has managed to overcome their\u00a0 dental fear\u00a0and make that all important first contact\u00a0with \u00a0a dental practice\u00a0 deserves congratulations for overcoming their \u201cnatural\u201d resistance to do so.\u00a0 What\u2019s more at that first visit, maybe it&#8217;s the dentist who should be apologising to you on behalf of our profession for making you scared or anxious in the first place!<\/p>\n<p>Just a thought<\/p>\n<p>Have a great week<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It still surprises me when someone new comes to see me for an examination or consultation at my Edinburgh Dental\u00a0 Practice how often they start our conversation by apologising for the \u201cstate\u201d of their teeth or for not having attended a dentist within the last 6 months, year or even longer. What\u2019s even more surprising &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/do-not-blame-yourself-for-your-dental-fear\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Do Not Blame Yourself For Your Dental Fear<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.craigentinny.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}