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Poll about pain at the dentist


SKL
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74 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you have pain when a hygienist cleans your teeth?

    • Yes, more often than not
      29
    • No, not usually
      42
    • CANDY BAR!!!
      0
    • ... I got the Candy Bar reference.
      1
    • ... I have no idea what candy bars have to do with this.
      16


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So I just got a routine teeth cleaning.  I haven't had this hygienist before.  Man she hurt me over and over.  I don't think I've had this much pain from a cleaning before.  I'm wondering if she's brutal or if this is just an old age thing (my age) or something. 

 

So ... hopefully the poll worked.  Comments welcome.  :)

Edited by SKL
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It's been a while since I saw a dentist, though the girls go religiously twice a year. I'm not worried about pain, I'm worried about a lecture! Our dentist is big on being pain-free, but you can't escape the lectures....

 

(I'm gonna have to suck it up and tell him that if he says one word to me about my teeth, I'll bolt.)

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The desk lady asked "did the hygienist have a chance to schedule your next visit?"  I'm thinking, "no, thank God."  I spent most of the time thinking how to make sure neither I nor my kids ever got her again.  :p

 

I just received a request from the dentist office to review the visit.  To be fair, if this lady is new, someone should tell her she's hurting people so she can try to fix it.

 

The reason I started this poll is so I can give a fair answer to the dentists' poll.

Edited by SKL
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Oh man, just reading your question made my mouth start to water and my lips twist. I hate cleanings so much. *shudder*

 

That said, they're rarely painful. I sometimes have rawness at the edges of my gums behind my bottom front teeth (I can never seem to get that spot clean enough) and the random pokey spot on the gumline in other places. But no, I don't tend to think of cleanings as painful experiences--just really, really cringey and uncomfortable. 

 

I think I'd be honest in the survey without being overly harsh about the hygienist, if possible. 

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Funny you should ask -- I just had mine cleaned this morning. And yes, it did hurt. It almost always does, to some extent or other. A lot does depend on the hygienist, but I know that both my gums and teeth have become more sensitive as I've aged.

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I think some dental hygienists are better than others, BUT it is also true that amount of tartar/gum issues increase around peri menopause/ menopause. So, it may be her or it may be changes your teeth/oral health.

 

I meant to say that she remarked on how clean my teeth were before she started working.  So while I doubt they were exceptionally hard to clean, I did wonder if my age was somehow making my gums more sensitive.

 

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I always have a bit of discomfort but I definitely have had some hygienists that must have worked for the Spanish Inquisition.  Seriously, they would be better at torture than dental cleanings.

 

If you have her again, speak up.  Seriously.  I did that with one and it DID help.  I was polite, smiled, made eye contact and explained that I had a lot of pain with the last cleaning and was hoping there was something she could do to lessen the pain this time around.  She worked hard to be more gentle.

 

Now I did have one that basically told me to suck it up butter cup and was, if anything, even rougher the second time but we were moving so I didn't pursue anything further.  Otherwise I might have complained to the dentist.

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I gave you my honest answer, but it could easily be misinterpreted.

 

I'm the one that should never open and dentist or tooth thread; Yea, that one; you know, the one who sometimes posts the same irrelevant boo hoo hooing over and over again because she isn't even aware of it?

 

I'm sure you know who I am. Let's try something else to jog your memory.

 

Anyway, I'm the toothless and although advanced periodontal disease does make routine dental cleanings significantly more painful, when they thought they could make a $10,000 sale if they humoured me, I was always offered topical gel, sometimes even before I asked, and they said things like, "Oh that's okay. Everybody has different pain tolerance. I believe you." which is a good thing because it takes enough lidocaine to kill a horse for me not to feel an extraction and that's just the way my body works.

 

When the thing I splatter all over the internet without being aware of it happened, I was not offered any gel or any compassion and every time I tried to be polite and say, "You don't have to talk to me that way. English isn't only my native language, it was my major in college." or "Are you sure that's the right chart? Dr. X has had me on a four times a year schedule for ten years, not a two times a year schedule, and I never questioned that and can only remember one time I had to reschedule an appointment" she didn't just yell "I AM GOING TO ED YOU KATE YOU THAT YOU DID NOT HAVE TO LET ALL OF YOUR TEETH ROT OUT JUST BECAUSE I HATE POOR PEOPLE SO MUCH EVERYBODY THOUGHT I COULD MAKE YOU SHELL OUT THE $10,000 OR LEAVE THIS PRACTICE FOREVER....", she poked harder, pushed more painfully, and did other things that were within the letter but not the spirit of the law.

 

So yea, it's not your imagination.

 

I am in no way implying that anything in your post made me or anyone else think that YOU are a toothless instead of a real human being who deserves to be treated with a certain amount of compassion and dignity, just saying that it might not be the worst idea in the world to ask for your usual hygeinist at your next appointment and, if you have that kind of relationship with your dentist and if this is a new hygeinist and if you can do so without having security call the police about the toothless throwing a drunk and disorderly in their waiting room, maybe inform him of the fact in the same manner you would tell a friend that her new housekeeper is stealing her silverware.

 

/classism rant that isn't even remotely what combat soldiers go through when their buddies get killed in front of them so i refuse to self-diagnose it as PTSD, but it's still a hertz donut and it still makes me different from all the rest of you and I still think my experience has value as a cautionary tale

Edited by Guest
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It hurts me too.  I avoided the dentist for years because Novocaine doesn't work on me either. These days I go do a dentist that uses some other drug, I don't remember what it was called, but I like the dentist.

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I go to a place that caters to people who flip out at the dentist so they do whatever they can to minimize pain or discomfort of any kind.

 

Where my husband goes they don't do that.  He never complains.  The kids go to that place and they don't complain about pain either.  One place my husband once went to years ago he complained about.  So it seems possible that some are more rough than others. 

 

 

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Cleanings rarely bother me. But every once in a while, I will get a new hygienist who just rips apart my gums with her sharp pointy things and I feel like I am tasting blood for days. I know it is not the condition of my teeth because I am a "floss every day, brush twice a day without fail kind of person." (I may be lazy/undisciplined about many things in my life, but not dental hygiene... my mom had lots of periodontal problems that I figured out I needed to work on avoiding.)

 

Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk

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Depends on whether I've taken care of my teeth. If I brush and floss regularly, not at all or not much. If I haven't seen a dentist in years and haven't flossed a single time in my life, then yes, it HURTS. 

 

So, if you don't floss, I'd recommend flossing. 

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Honestly, I'd straight up tell the dentist office about your experience.  It could be the hygienist's issue, and she should receive guidance.  Or it could be a brewing dental/medical problem with you, and it needs to be further checked out.

The desk lady asked "did the hygienist have a chance to schedule your next visit?"  I'm thinking, "no, thank God."  I spent most of the time thinking how to make sure neither I nor my kids ever got her again.  :p

 

I just received a request from the dentist office to review the visit.  To be fair, if this lady is new, someone should tell her she's hurting people so she can try to fix it.

 

The reason I started this poll is so I can give a fair answer to the dentists' poll.

 

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It hurts to some degree every time. They do this thing where they take one of their metal tools and slide it straight down into your gums next to each tooth and call out numbers as they do "1-2-1, 4-3-4, etc". They're seeing how deep they can jam that metal into your gums. The higher number, the farther in it goes.

 

That hurts.

 

And then they start the scraping and that hurts, too.

 

And then they floss. And sometimes they can't get the floss between the teeth and push harder on the floss until jams into the gums.

 

I brush twice a day and floss once a day and use mouthwash and also some rubber things I stick between my teeth (like floss.)

 

 

 

...And then the dentist got a new hygenist. And it still hurts a bit, but no where near what it used to be like. And now I realize that the hygienist was a factor in how much pain I was in. The first one, that made it so painful (one time I asked her to please skip the flossing because it hurt so much), likes to talk a lot while she's working on the teeth. And I'm thinking the more she talks, the less she pays attention to what she's doing.

 

The new hygienist is very quiet during the cleaning and it's much, much better.

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Other. I get them cleaned every 3 months.

If they use the water cleaning tool, then yes.  I have Raynaud's Syndrome which makes me incredibly sensitive to cold in general, and in my case, it includes my teeth. It also causes pain in my ears.  My tubes aren't positioned normally and often have fluid in them and the water cleaning really hurts them. When they check my gum health it can be uncomfortable because I have a genetic tendency to thin, receding gums.  I had my first skin graft onto my gums and it was well worth the 4 days of discomfort after the surgery because it stopped gum sensitivity in that area.

 

If do manual scraping then no.

Edited by Homeschool Mom in AZ
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It hurts me too.  I avoided the dentist for years because Novocaine doesn't work on me either. These days I go do a dentist that uses some other drug, I don't remember what it was called, but I like the dentist.

 

My dentist caters to people with dental phobias.  They send out this lady who is a cross between your dear sweet granny and a drug dealer who asks you if you want to be conscious for your treatment, and what kind of anti-anxiety meds and pain killers you want. You name it, you can have it. I had a series of things I wanted done in 1 sitting (4 hours total) and one involved lasering a part of my gums. They gave me "I don't care" pills that caused me to fall off the couch onto the floor when I tried to walk to the car to go to my appointment.  I felt totally zen sitting in the chair like it was no big deal. God bless them!

 

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My dentist doesn't have a hygienest. It hurts when the dentist does it. I get large buildups of plaque. My old dentist (retired now) told me that he has only seen a few people who get as much plaque as me and all of them (me included) don't have any/ many fillings and his view was that the few people like me that get a huge plaque buildup actually have a very alkaline mouth. The opposet to what happens to most people with plaque build ups.

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I think it definitely depends on the hygienist. There's little bits of gum some of them catch with the plaque removing tool. I think the gum there must be very thin and/or translucent.

 

Assuming the same person at a similar time period with similar problems and different hygienists and different experiences.

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