[Unpad.ac.id, 13/09/2016] Dental Anxiety, or patient’s anxiety during or prior oral and dental care will greatly affect the success of the dentist in performing a medical procedure. Dental anxiety experienced by patients may lead to reluctance to undergo dental treatment. This reluctance can go a long way and will influence their quality of life, if the dental and oral diseases suffered by patients are not treated completely.
Lecturer from the Faculty of Dentistry, Universitas Padjadjaran Gilang Yubiliana, drg., Kes., found that dental anxiety in patients can be reduced through the Dental Hypnosis-Communication Hypnodontics. This process can reduce the level of anxiety, and will increase the comfort to the patient for dental treatment.
“The intervention of Dental Hypnosis-Communication Hypnodontics has been proven effective in reducing levels of the cortisol saliva hormone as biomarker for dental anxiety, and it has a strong correlation with the increase in the quality of life in patients with dental anxiety for tooth extraction, so it can be recommended for use in clinical practice,” Gilang said, when reading the findings of her dissertation at the Doctoral Promotion session held at the Unpad Teaching Hospital, Jln. Eijkman 38 Bandung, Tuesday (13/09).
On the occasion, Gilang defended her dissertation entitled “Effectiveness of Dental Hypnosis-Communication Hypnodontics in Declining the Cortisol Saliva Hormone Levels as Biomarker for Dental Anxiety and Its Correlation with the Quality of Life”.
The study consists of two stages. The first step is composing a script module titled “Community Hypnodontics” which is an intervention tool for dental hypnosis. This module contains a set of words strung together into sentences equipped with a specific linguistic strategy that aims to bring the patient to be more relaxed during the dental procedure. This process also involves linguistics experts with the rules of pragmatics.
“Language is the most important aspect in the process of dental hypnosis intervention because the whole process uses language as a medium of communication to convey the suggestion, “said Gilang.
The second phase of research was conducted with the implementation of intervention tool of Dental Hypnosis-Communication Hypnodontics in decreasing dental anxiety by using cortisol saliva level biomarker.
Gilang also said that the intervention of dental hypnosis uses language styles, such as the climax, the parallelism, the antithesis, and the repetition. The type of speech acts used when intervening consist of direct-commanding speech act, direct-stating speech act, and indirect-stating speech act.
“All the linguistic strategies used aim to give suggestions so that patients to not feeling anxious during medical treatment,” said Gilang who earned her Doctoral degree with Cum laude.*
Reported by Artanti Hendriyana / eh
