Up To A Point, Dentists Have To Be Photographers Too

From small talk to sedatives, dentists can go about calming down their most anxious patients in many ways. For every method just before sedation, there is one common goal: informing the patient. The adage that ‘people fear what they do not understand’ cannot be any truer in the dental setting. After all, the patients are the ones to sit in the dentist’s chair with their mouths open for however long the treatment takes. It pays to know, and there is no better way to do so than by looking at a photograph.

Trust through Lens

For the longest time, patients had the luxury of viewing x-rays of teeth in order to understand what their dentist has and is about to do — luxury being a key term, as most practices would just resort to professional trust as a way of putting patients at ease. That is assuming trust exists in the first place.

Dentists from mismile.co.uk can attest to the varying mileage of this approach, with many patients having to depend on nothing more than their dentist’s word. Fortunately, cameras can lend weight to those words, in a way that eliminates any room for doubt.

Understanding through Sight

The late Henry Tanner served as one of the Pankey Institute’s most prominent dentistry professors, and his view on dental photography counts against the negative tendencies of every patient’s imagination, and the limitations of oral communication itself. ‘I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant’, Prof. Tanner often says, referring to the unique images patients have for individual explanations dentists provide.

‘Open to interpretation’ is the last thing dentists would want their diagnoses to be, and the fact that 65% of all people are visual learners should be reason enough for dentists to brush up on their photography knowledge.

Like any other worker in any other profession, dentists have to earn the trust of their patients in order to provide treatment that satisfies on both practical and psychological levels. As of now, a camera makes for the most effective tools in achieving this end, as long as the dentist points it at the less flattering aspects of their patient’s smile.