A recent study has discovered that acupuncture can help relieve dental anxiety for patients to receive their necessary treatments. The small study’s results are now released in Acupuncture in Medicine.

Statistics show that 1 in every 20 people feels too much anxiety just going to the dentist, a condition termed as odontophobia. About one third of these patients feel moderate anxiety at the mere sight of dental treatments according to the same study. The study has gathered these findings on about 16 women and 4 men from 8 practicing dentists.

The questionnaire employed by the study shows moderate to extreme anxiety just at the thought of visiting their dentists for treatment according the Back Anxiety Inventory or BAI, a validated questionnaire assessing each and every patients shivering at the mere thought of a dental treatment. Surprising enough, most of these patients were aged over 40 and had been having the same ordeal for a long time – some dealing with it for a minimum of 2 years while some others have been battling this anxiety for more than 30 years.

The Acupuncture treatment was administered by members of the British Dental Acupuncture Society who targeted two acupuncture points on top of the head, the GV20 and EX6, after the BAI scores were gathered and ascertained.

Skepticism towards the benefits of acupuncture in healing dental anxiety symptoms will just have to waver given the fact that British dentists themselves practice acupuncture as they have encountered these problems beforehand. This also enforces the fact that odontophobia, is a real problem requiring real and immediate solutions where before, it was dismissed as a nuisance condition devoid of any medical categorization.

BAI scores, after administering acupuncture, fell sharply to 11.5 from a high 25.5 as all 20 patients were able to receive their required dental treatments. Prior to acupuncture, only 6 of them were able to do so. Some of them only received such treatments after a great deal of effort from both the patient and the dentist.

Several attempts to control this anxiety have been made – behavioral therapies, sedatives, relaxation techniques, hypnosis, even biofeedback had been employed. Though it was shown that these alternatives helped calm dental anxieties, they all required extensive skills and were time consuming that proved to be longer than the dental treatments themselves.