Acupuncture can ease dentist phobia--study

Findings of a new research suggest that just one five-minute acupuncture session could significantly put nervous dental patients at ease.

Details of the study
To come up with this finding, researchers from England and Denmark enrolled 16 women and four men with an average age of 40 from eight dental practices in UK.

All these individuals suffered from moderate to severe dental anxiety called odontiatophobia for between two to 30 years.

For the study, these individuals were given one five-minute session of the traditional Chinese therapy.

During this session, a team of eight UK dentists inserted acupuncture needles at two acupuncture points, GV20 and EX6, known to aid relaxation, on top of the heads of all the participants.

The participants were also rated on a well known anxiety-reporting scale called the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) to determine their anxiety levels five minutes before and after the acupuncture session.

Outcome of the study
Analysis revealed that all the 20 patients who had needed general anesthesia or sedatives before visiting a dentist were now able to undergo a dental treatment without fear.

Additionally, their BAI scores fell down drastically and almost halved from 26.5 before acupuncture to 11.5 after the treatment, indicating that the traditional therapy significantly helped them conquer their fear by easing their dentist anxiety.

Dr Palle Rosted, who led the team of UK dentists, was quoted by the BBC as saying that the findings were extremely promising.

"Although it's a small number of patients that we've looked at, all of the patients benefited. These were patients who would have previously run screaming out of the door or would had to have been held down by a dental assistant to have their teeth checked," Dr Rosted said.

Acupuncture: simple and inexpensive method
Though recent studies have shown that other techniques such as hypnosis, relaxation therapy, biofeedback etc., can also be used to relieve the dental anxiety but those techniques are time consuming and may also cause side effects.

The authors concluded that acupuncture “prior to dental treatment has a beneficial effect on the level of anxiety in patients with dental anxiety and may offer a simple and inexpensive method of treatment.”

Despite the promising outcomes of the study, the experts feel there is need for further research to confirm the findings in a larger trial.

The study has been published in the journal Acupuncture in Medicine.