Dentist fear!

[Yasmine8]

My 16 year old has a massive phobia of the dentist!! Every time we go it always ends in tears, she's had two wisdom teeth out and a few fillings but other from that it's always check ups. What can I do to conquer her fear?

What created the fear? Work backwards.

For me it was crap dental treatment with ineffective anaesthesia aged about 10. I lost all trust in the abilities of the entire profession. It then became a control issue whereby the inability to see or control what was happening compounded the terror.

I found the more I knew about the processes - being shown the tools, detailed explanation of what they were going to do, how deep the injections would go, how deep the drilling would be etc - the less I panicked.

It took nearly 15 years for me to find a dentist I trusted enough to relax and not sob through a check up. In the interim, I had sedation for all treatment. Very expensive, very time consuming, and meant I saved up multiple issues for each appointment.

Do you have a dental school at a university near you? That was what helped me - the appointments were longer, but much slower and I was in more control.