Hi, I’m Dr Michael Cai, the principal dentist of Pitt St Dental Centre here in Sydney CBD.
This Monday, a new patient, Kim from Woollahra, had a dental procedure done with us. She hasn’t been to a dentist for the last 15 years. She had a really bad experience when she was a child, and it was so painful that she just never wanted to step into a dental clinic again. But now she knew she needed some work done. And we were so glad she trusted us and our team.
After her procedure, she said to me, “Wow Michael, I barely felt anything during the treatment! If I knew it was going to be as comfortable as this, I would have visited you guys sooner!”
This is such a common reaction of our anxious patients, so I decided to make this short video sharing with you how we look after our anxious patients like Kim.
Instead of bringing you straight to the dental chair in the surgery, we’ll invite you to our consultation room to get a thorough understanding of what you want to achieve. Once we have a clear understanding of your concerns, your goals, and your medical history, then we will bring you to the dental chair.
We have noise cancelling headphones so you can listen to your favourite music or watch your favourite show on Netflix. This also helps to take your mind off the process.
If you’re worried about needles, there are things that we do to minimise the discomfort. We’ll always put numbing gel before we give you any local anaesthetic. This way you will barely feel a thing when we give you the local anaesthetics.
There are lots of ways for us to help you to relax during the dental visit. It ranges from giving you medications to take the edge off. We can also give you happy gas, so you can feel nice and calm. But if you’re still quite anxious, what we do is we can even put you to sleep to complete all the treatment for you.
We can do both twilight sedation here at the practice and general anaesthetic in the hospital if required.
The beautiful thing about having twilight dentistry is you won’t remember a thing, and you won’t feel a thing. You will not be sore when you wake up because we always put local anaesthetic in. And before they wear off, we’ll prepare you with pain medication to manage the discomfort afterwards.
Our goal is to build a great dental experience for you, so you will feel more relaxed for your future visits.
I hope this video gave you a better understanding of how we take care of anxious patients here at Pitt St Dental Centre.
