It’s natural to be afraid of pain. Modern dentistry is now almost pain-free, but when some pain is inevitable, anaesthesia provides various ways to control it. The essential pain prevention technique is careful use of local anaesthetic. Here’s what we normally do, although there are extra steps we can take to help individual patients. We use a cotton bud to wipe a surface anaesthetic onto the gum. This numbs the gum so that the subsequent anaesthetic injection is felt only as pressure, not as pain. Press your finger tip against a portion of your gum; that’s very close to the feeling of being anaesthetised at Evergreen.

We leave the local anaesthetic to get to work for a few minutes, and before we start any treatment, we’ll check with you that both teeth and jaw are truly numb. After treatment, anaesthesia takes several hours to wear off completely, time enough for a treated tooth to stabilise, so that after recovery at best there will be no pain, at worst a slight tenderness.

If our standard anaesthetic practice is not enough to allay a patient’s fear, then we can use other techniques. One is intravenous sedation, which lets you snooze through treatment; you will be drowsy and unaware of time passing. Although you are not – technically – asleep, you’ll have little or no memory of your treatment. With sedation, treatment is performed more comfortably than you might ever have thought possible. With modern equipment we monitor our patients continuously throughout treatment under sedation and recovery.