Dental fear in a clinical practice

Despite continuously improved techniques in dentistry, fear is a problem in the dental health services. Today, a successful dental practice relies both on interpersonal and technical skills, which includes the ability to treat patients with fear. In general dental practice, where time is limited there is little room for elaborated diagnostics of dental anxiety. Thus, it would be advantageous for the practicing dentist to have access to a screening instrument that gives information easily and rapidly about the degree of dental fear in patients. Besides the need for a screening instrument, it would be desirable to have access to an instrument measuring the aspects of dental fear, so that different fear profiles could be handled by tailoring specific treatments and patient support. This presupposes, however, that the measurement used to identify such factors can be trusted. In this book we analyze the dimensionality of the Dental Fear Survey (DFS) for patients awaiting dental treatment in a private dental practice, and compare this result to other analyses. We also analyze the relationship between dental fear and the use of fluoride in the same group of patients.