Acupuncture Could Make Dentist Trips Easier! Could it work for you?

Acupuncture Could Make Dentist Trips Easier! Could it work for you?

March 30, 2010 04:37 PM EDT
by Jen Curran


The ancient treatment of Acupuncture, a new study finds, might ease people's stress when in the dental chair. This information, reported yesterday by SparkPeople.com brings some welcome relief to those of us with dental phobia.

It happens every time I go to the dentist. I anticipate the visit for the whole day, I start to get clammy hands as I walk into their offices, my breathing becomes shallow while I flip through magazines in the waiting room.

And within two minutes of being in The Chair, my whole body is soaked with sweat, my legs feel like heavy tree trunks, my jaw and shoulders are tense, and I'm wishing it all away, squeezing the arms of that awful chair praying for it to be over.

Wow, that all sounds super crazy, doesn't it?

Well, it turns out I'm not alone. In fact, I'm not even one of the really bad cases. People report panic attacks and even debilitating phobias when it comes to a trip to the dentist. According to research done at a hospital in England, and reported by HealthDay News earlier this week, one in 20 people suffer from odontophobia - severe anxiety about dentistry - and a third of all people say they have moderate anxiety when seeing the dentist.

Acupuncture, a healing method practiced in China for more than 2,000 years, has some advantages over other methods a dentist might use to help people with their stress, according to the report published March 29 in the most recent issue of "Acupuncture in Medicine."

According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, acupuncture has been looked at as a way to ease a variety of different aches and pains such as carpal tunnel syndrome, fibromyalgia, headache, low-back pain, menstrual cramps, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, tennis elbow and even post-operative dental pain. So it would naturally follow that if acupuncture can address some of those issues, it might be able to address stress, which is ultimately the pain of the mind.

The lead researcher on this study, Dr. Palle Rosted, is from the department of oncology at Weston Park Hospital in Sheffield, England. He says that in many cases, a dentist can start to work on patients five minutes after insertion of the needles.

Basically, the study noted patients' anxiety levels before and after administering an acupuncture treatment. They used something called the "Back Anxiety Inventory," or BAI questionnaire to score people's reported stress. After the acupuncture treatment was performed, inserting thin needles into specific areas on the body, including two places on the top of the patients' heads, the researchers discovered that the BAI score for most people dropped, on average, from 26.5 down to 11.5.

However the BAI measures anxiety, exactly, is not something I totally understand. But considering that the number dropped by over half, I'd say that's a pretty significant decrease in one's stress levels.

Dentists like this alternative treatment, SparkPeople.com reports, because it's quick, easy, often very affective, and makes their job a lot easier. And patients like it because it's very inexpensive.

I've always wanted to try acupuncture, I have friends that swear by it, and I'm very open to alternative healing methods and options that don't involve drugs. If I could find a dentist that offered this option AND understood my irrational fear of being in his chair, sign me up!

Would you be willing to try acupuncture at the dentist?

As posted at; http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978140660