My First Visit to the Dentist, Essay Example

The significance of a first trip to the dentist is often associated with various nightmarish images of the experience as it is portrayed in the public imagination. The most common phobia of dentistry is connected with anticipations of the pain that the patient will experience: the dentist can be analogous to a kind of medical bogeyman. These feelings of apprehension are especially relevant when reflecting on the first trip to the dentist, insofar as here the patient is precisely lacking in experience of the experience – basically, he or she only has the words of others to go on. This can have a clear effect and influence on the prospective patient – being surrounded, for example, by family members who regard the dentist with apprehension, will inevitably imbue the young person who is making their first visit with fear. Such explicit fear was not present in my first visit. My family members were not afraid of the dentist, but rather considered it an inconvenience, although necessary. Yet when considering this psychological background to my first visit to the dentist, a descriptive account of this experience of the unknown also becomes relevant –how do the senses and the direct empirical perception of this first visit heighten or diminish the preconception of the visit? In my own case, the largely negative image of dentistry displayed by my family certainly influenced my perception of dentistry – it was an unpleasant experience, and to some extent it did invoke a certain repulsion. Thus, reflecting on how my psychological preconceptions about dentistry correspond to my senses of this first dentistry experience shows how the psychological can influence these very sensual descriptions. In other words, because of the negative view of dentistry I had gained through familial ties, my subsequent sensual perceptions can be said to have been conditioned by the psychological.

The first trip to the dentist was preceded by a feeling of nervous anxiety. I knew that my parents did not particularly care for trips to the dentist. This definitely influenced my own psychological approach to the visit. Following my parents, I thought that this would not be fun. It was rather something necessary to be done, I understood, for health reasons. Yet at this time, I had a difficult time reconciling the health of teeth with overall bodily health – aren’t there health issues more serious than a tooth? We are all born without teeth and all lose them at the end, so what is the necessity of this task? And certainly, I had also heard stories in popular culture and other media about various phobias of dentistry. These two issues formed a certain negative preconception of the experience before it began.

Describing the dentist experience from a purely sensual perspective helps understand how these senses may refute or support our psychological preconceptions. In my case, the senses supported my negative anxiety as opposed to overturning it. Firstly, from the standpoint of the visual, the office was clearly mundane and bureaucratic looking. However, it is these most boring of settings that can provoke generate anxiety: the blandness of the office further accentuated the notion of the tediousness of this task. Moreover, the waiting patients did not look particularly pleased to be making their own respective visits. When called into the dentist office, the appearance of the dentist was not of particular note. Rather, the perspective from the dentist’s chair was what was most striking. Viewing the process from this “frog’s point of view” – as it is called into arts – meant that I saw only parts of the various dentist tools being used to work on the teeth. The visual field when sitting in the dentist chair is limited, and in this case, this further heightens the anxiety of the experience – one cannot move around and understand what is going to happen next. From the standpoint of a preconceived aversion to the process, the limits of vision that arise from being asked to remain in place within the dentist chair heightened the anxiety.

The smell of the dentist office certainly also confirmed the unpleasantness of the process. The hygienic chemicals common to medical environments is a generally repulsive smell – when one breathes it in, they simultaneously imagine all the germs and bacteria that the odor is attempting to cover over. Moreover, there is such an artificiality to the smell that one thinks that they have entered a room that is removed from all of nature. Once again, the foreignness creates – or rather – corresponds to the pre-existing apprehension that existed within me.

Closely related to smell in this regard is the sense of taste. The dry air of the office that I visited left one begging for water. Furthermore, the artificiality of the various tooth-cleaning chemicals and the metallic taste of the tools that the dentist used were completed removed from natural tastes. The fakeness of the tooth cleaning materials, I can distinctly recall, made me nauseous. This further underscored the unpleasantness that I associated with the visit.

The sensation of touch was in this case dominated by the feel of the dentist’s chair. Its plastic-covering once again made me notice the uncomfortable and artificial nature of the material. I felt like an animal having been removed from its most natural environment. Issues of sterility are obviously crucial to any medical environment; yet it is this sterility that one sensually experiences which heightens the fear, precisely because one is forced to sensually experience a wholly unfamiliar and unnatural environment. Perhaps this is what animals that are being tested in laboratory settings feel like?

In terms of hearing, there is a remarkable contrast of sounds that exists in the dentist’s office. In the waiting room, there was almost a complete silence, interrupted only by minimal chatter from waiting patients or the hollow ringing sound of the occasional telephone call. This silence contrasts with the audio experience when sitting in the dentist chair – the scraping and the drilling sounds produced by the various tools are almost infinitely loud in comparison to the previous silence. It was as though the silence existed on purpose to build fear, as if one were waiting for their own execution; the violent grinding of the dentist instruments was the act of the execution itself. Certainly, such a description is an exaggeration, but when considering a negative psychological preconception of the experience, the logic behind this interpretation becomes clearer.

These sensual experiences are entirely, of course, subjective interpretations of my first trip to the dentist’s office. However, what is crucial is that my psychological preconceptions clearly informed these interpretations. If, for example, I had grown up the son of a dentist, this unfamiliarity and anxiety would not exist. In my case, the preconceived anxiety and unpleasantness of the experience led my senses to extract and highlight the negative aspects of this visit. With time and familiarity the overall odiousness of the visits to the dentist disappeared – it nevertheless remained a pure inconvenience.