Despite the pain and anxiety that you might feel when going to the dentist, skipping it entirely should not be an option.
Suffering from heightened sensitivity can be challenging in many ways. One of them is going to the dentist, which for many, can be a painful and anxiety-inducing experience. To solve these issues, a common strategy used by those with heightened sensitivity is seeing a sedation dentist. Here’s why.
Skipping is Not an Option
If you experience heightened sensitivity, you may consider not going to the dentist at all. Even worse, you may have already made this choice, and are currently suffering the consequences. There are three reasons why you should not adopt the habit of skipping the dentist.
Maintenance – Between scraping plaque, fluoride treatments, and much more, regular dental visits do a lot to support your oral health.
Early Detection – If a severe issue is brewing, your dentist can recognize it before it’s too late.
Cost Savings – One of the benefits of early detection is that you will not have to pay high costs for complicated procedures. Instead, you can prevent them from happening in the first place.
Pain Reduction
Once you understand the importance of the dentist, it’s important to understand why sedation is so helpful. The first reason is pain reduction. As somebody with heightened sensitivity, you feel dental work more than others. Every scratch and drill of a dentist’s tool puts you in a state of tremendous pain. Rather than suffer through this discomfort, you can use sedation. What this method will do is make you partially unconscious. The result will be pain that is lessened or eliminated entirely.
Quelling Anxiety
Though heightened sensitivity and dental anxiety are two separate issues, they often go hand in hand. This makes sense, as knowing you will undergo severe pain during dental treatment is bound to cause negative emotions. If you use sedation, you will go to the dentist understanding that you will feel little or no pain. Doing so can decrease anxiety and lead to a more positive experience.
Local Anesthetic is Not Enough
Some conventional dentists try to fight heightened sensitivity with a local anesthetic. Unfortunately, this treatment is not enough for many patients. The reason is that while these medications decrease feeling, you are still fully conscious throughout. For a person with severe sensitivity issues, adding sedation is a much more effective treatment than anesthetic alone.
Routine and Extensive Procedures
Another aspect of sedation dentistry is that it can be used in a variety of situations. Whether you’re getting a simple cleaning or a complicated surgery, you can use sedation to decrease pain and quell your fears. If you do so, your trip to the dentist will be stress-free no matter how long or complex your procedure might be.
Despite the pain and anxiety that you might feel when going to the dentist, skipping it entirely is not an option. Instead, it is better to examine ways to get your treatment without all of that frustration and pain. Once you do, you may decide that it is time to consider seeing a sedation dentist in St. Louis.