Dentists are moving away from the old way of doing business and moving toward the dental spa concept, a new trend in dentistry. Patients no longer have to expect pain and discomfort from the dentist’s office experience and can feel good — even pampered.
Patients often feel anxiety about a dentist visit because of past experiences involving pain, and that creates resistance to necessary treatment. But times have changed.
Those early childhood experiences at the dentist caused many people to lose trust in the dental treatment process. Going to the dentist for many people meant getting hurt by someone they were told they could trust, and that creates a lifelong negative association.
The dental spa model is completely different. No longer hurting patients is the top priority, but a number of other things make today’s dental spas different from and better than old-fashioned dental offices.
One of them is aromatherapy. Many pure essences have a relaxing effect. Just activating a patient’s sense of smell in this way can help eliminate the sense of danger and make for a more pleasant experience. Plus, aromatherapy can generate an overall sense of wellbeing that lasts long beyond the time in the dental office.
Also, we make every effort to counsel patients and help them separate past bad experiences from present experiences which are not bad, and that’s also key to their increasing trust in our dental office experience. While we can’t cause people to stop thinking about things that are already imprinted on their brains, we can help them address the elephant in the parlor so they can move on with their lives.
We can help people realize that those historical events don’t have anything to do with this present moment. Once they realize that there is a separation between then and now rather than drawing a connection, their experience can improve.
The dental spa experience also involves cosmetic dentistry and teeth whitening, procedures that don’t have much discomfort involved with them. But these patients may also need some additional, more extensive work, and they need to know that the technology and procedures are available to help them eliminate their connection with any painful experiences of the past and get the help they need.
The dental spa experience also involves merging traditional medicine and dentistry with holistic medicine and dentistry as well as Eastern philosophies and more. When performed together, these ways of approaching issues can do the most good.
For so long, there has been conflict between allopathic practitioners and holistic dentists and doctors, but that doesn’t have to be the case. If someone gets run over by a car, they don’t want to go to a herbalist. They need emergency care from professional orthopedic surgeons and others who know how to take care of the problems. But for those with chronic pain or other chronic problems that allopathic medicine cannot help with, it often makes sense to look at alternative treatments because they tend to have more success with those kinds of things.
The dental spa experience can also include acupuncture, and some dental spas actually have acupuncturists come into the practice to help with specific issues. These include the reduction of the pain sensation and the reduction of anxiety. When used alongside massage, reflexology and similar modalities, these things can help make the dental spa experience as enjoyable and productive as possible.
There’s no reason to settle for an exclusively old-fashioned approach to dentistry anymore when the dental spa experience is available in many places, including at our clinic. Please contact us now at (619) 630-7174 to schedule an appointment with Dr. Vinograd, a holistic dentist who offers a dental spa experience. You’ll be very glad you did.
