Needle injections can make a visit to the dentist much more tense than it needs to be. Even if you aren’t suffering from a dental phobia, the prospect of an injection can strike fear into your heart. However, many essential dental procedures require an injection to facilitate treatment. From simple tasks like filling a cavity to more involved procedures like a root canal, your dentist must be sure you are properly numb so you won’t feel any pain during the rest of your procedure.
In the past, fearful patients have had to bear painful injections and wait for a numbing solution to spread through the site of injection. Now, innovations like DentalVibe’s Comfort Injection System can block pain signals from reaching the brain, allowing dentists to tell their patients that their injections will be pain-free.
Are you curious to discover how a dental needle can be pain-free? Read on to learn how this scientifically proven method can make dentistry a pleasant experience.
Why dental injections usually hurt
Injections with a traditional dental needle hurt for a few different reasons, aside from the obvious fact that having sharp objects penetrate the soft tissue of your mouth (even if briefly) is going to be uncomfortable.
Your whole mouth contains a complex network of nerves, and people often forget that teeth, despite their outer coating of resistant enamel, are also part of this network. When you look at the different parts of a tooth, you’ll realize that beyond the mineralized exterior, teeth are fairly sensitive to pain, as are the gums and tissue of your mouth (although to different degrees).
Depending on where your dentist injects the anesthetic, your nerves may amplify the sting of the dental needle. Anesthetic also takes time to spread, and sometimes the process is too slow to prevent painful sensations. Dentists will sometimes shake the cheek to help the anesthetic spread throughout the injection area, but this isn’t always as effective as dentists (or patients) would like.
Designing a pain-free injection experience
DentalVibe gives dentists and patients another option. The DentalVibe device is a harmless-looking wand with a pronged end, which vibrates gently at the site of the injection. This vibration is the secret to painless injections, because of something known as the gate control theory of pain. The gate control theory of pain states that when you distract the brain with a pleasant sensation while it experiences a painful one simultaneously, the pleasant sensation cancels out the painful one.
The DentalVibe device stimulates the tissue at the site of injection, just as the needle simultaneously injects the tissue. When these happen simultaneously, the neural pain gate is “closed,” and you barely feel anything at all. The vibration from the device also causes the anesthetic to spread throughout the injection site quicker and more efficiently than shaking the cheek, since the device is able to vibrate the tissue around 16,000 times!
Pain is no longer an unavoidable aspect of the dental experience with DentalVibe! Nearly 100% of people who experience a painless injection have had their perception of dentistry shift. You no longer have to tolerate a painful dental condition or postpone a procedure due to fear of a dental injection.
Find a DentalVibe dentist
Make dental fear a thing of the past and get the treatment you need to keep your teeth healthy. Find a dentist in your area who uses DentalVibe.
