The easiest way to make visits to the dentist relaxing is to keep little teeth clean and healthy. If we succeed in holding caries & co. at bay from the outset, all your child needs are regular check-ups and preventive dental care. Then every appointment at Dr. Christina Jürgensen’s paediatric dental practice will automatically provide your child with a great sense of achievement!
If, however, your child does have a tooth in need of treatment, we apply a systematically relaxed approach. Plenty of calmness, praise and diverting stories are often enough to make your child feel at ease. Sometimes more calming is required for very young or anxious children, children with disabilities or children in need of extensive dental treatments. In such cases, our perfectly equipped paediatric dental practice in Nuremberg is able to gently carry out treatments using nitrous oxide (laughing gas) or under anaesthetic.
Sensitive children are able to get to know our practice one little step at a time. From the unfamiliar smells and instruments to the strange sounds that some of them make. Like our insatiable suction tool “Slurpy” or the shrill jet engines of our aeroplane drill. Through desensitisation, anxious, reserved, cautious or just very young children slowly work their way round to the new environment. Ideally, they will initially come to see us just for check-ups and prophylaxis at the practice. This way we can slowly build up their confidence and practice dental procedures with them. If they require treatment at a later stage, everything will already be familiar to them and they will feel like an old hand at it.
Paediatric hypnosis is primarily concerned with inundating the senses with positive stimuli. Then any negative ones have hardly a chance of getting through. This has nothing to do with magic or submission. We simply use stories, hypnotic speech patterns and accompanying optical and tactile stimuli to create a natural state of relaxation. The children’s imagination is a great help here. By becoming totally absorbed in an exciting story, they manage to completely forget all sense of time as well as any anxiety. Even brief moments of pain are simply blocked out. At the end, all they can recall are good memories of the treatment they received at their paediatric dental practice.
We can administer a mixture of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and oxygen via a funny mask that fits over the child's nose during treatment. This helps the child to relax and muffles any external stimuli. Our young patients feel extremely comfortable and remain fully conscious and responsive throughout. We can strengthen this sense of well-being even further through praise and positive words. Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) is very well tolerated and doses can be tailored very precisely to each individual child. The child returns to their normal state as soon as the gas is switched off. This makes modern nitrous oxide (laughing gas) analgesia simple and safe. Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) often changes the child’s sense of time passing – and so longer treatments are possible without any problems. And because the child’s sense of pain is reduced, it is much easier for them to tolerate uncomfortable moments such as having an injection of anaesthetic.
Keeping still although they might be in a bit of discomfort is a mammoth task even for the most cooperative children. And some children are so nervous or fidgety that it would be practically impossible to carry out thorough dental treatment. This is when sedation can be helpful. It facilitates minor, quick procedures without the need for general anaesthetic and prevents children from having a traumatic experience at the dentist. Sedation is performed in the familiar setting of our practice. An experienced team of anaesthetists are on hand to monitor the treatments. The anaesthetist determines how much sedative is administered based on the individual child and the child’s condition on the day. Parents are present when their child falls asleep and when he or she wakes up again afterwards. The child is completely unaware of the quick and pain-free treatment we have performed and leaves the paediatric dental practice feeling happy and with intact teeth.
If several little teeth are diseased, depending on the individual case, one of the best and most gentle methods of thorough and lasting treatment is to take care of everything in one go under anaesthesia. This is because complete dental restoration would be more stressful for the child than general anaesthesia. Our paediatric dental practice is perfectly equipped for paediatric dental treatments under anaesthesia. An experienced anaesthetist closely monitors your child throughout the treatment and until your child is ready to go home. While he or she sleeps peacefully through the unpleasant parts.
If we recommend your child is treated under anaesthesia, we will quietly discuss all the details of the treatment with you beforehand. It is important that your child does not eat anything before the appointment. Once the anaesthetic is administered, it only takes a few minutes for your child to fall into a deep sleep. Parents remain with their child up until this point and may return to their child’s side straight after the procedure. This means you are right there when your child wakes up after a 1 to 2-hour nap in a cosy little bed in a private room.
When we are working with anaesthesia, we on principle treat all our patient’s teeth to restore them to good dental health. So that this remains the case and no other treatments are needed, we recommend regular check-ups and prophylaxis appointments.
This is something we can help you with at Dr. Christina Jürgensen’s paediatric dental practice. By using child-focused methods and performing dental treatment specifically for children, we make every visit to the dentist a relaxing and positive experience. See for yourselves
