The Emotional Aspect of Dentistry: How You Can Achieve the Best Chairside Manner

As a dentist, you view oral care today as a miracle. To you, it is a science and an art form, an incredible benefit of modern life. You are passionate about the improvement that contemporary dentistry can make on people’s comfort and overall health.

But unfortunately, many of your patients don’t see things the same way. Or maybe they do—surely they at least understand how important quality dental care is for their well-being.

Either way, one fact is true for many patients: the dentist can be scary!

Inaccurately, our society has convinced a vast swath of the population that dentistry can be frightening, even though advances have almost entirely eliminated pain during dental work.

We published another blog post about ways you can reduce dental anxiety for pediatric patients. But today, we’re going to shift the focus to all patients as we talk about the emotional aspect of dentistry. Here are a few tips on how you can achieve the best chairside manner, and make your patients feel more at ease as a result.

1. Study Up on Emotional Intelligence

We’re going to come out of the gate with the tip that might make the biggest difference in achieving the best chairside manner, but might also require the most work:

Study not just the latest dental technologies and trends, but also the concept of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence “refers to the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions.” While much of this concept ties into how you handle your own emotions internally, emotional intelligence (EQ) also connects to the way we are able to interact with the world. If you’ve ever felt a disconnect between you and the people around you, or find that the reactions of others often surprise you, it could be because you don’t have a naturally robust EQ.

Wherever your EQ level might be now, experts have outlined many techniques to help us build greater emotional intelligence! This RocheMartin article has 50 tips, but the section on empathy stands out for you, our dental professional readers. Here is their advice for building your understanding of others:

• Listen intently and genuinely when others are speaking with you
• Try to present approachable body language and tone of voice
• Put yourself in other peoples’ shoes
• Cultivate a curiosity about strangers and their lives
• Acknowledge what others are saying with phrases like “I understand” and “I see what you mean”

All of the above would certainly serve you well as you interact with your patients! And you and your team likely already do employ some of these EQ techniques. But as you get busy and focus on your dental work (as you should!), being intentional about these approaches to patient connection can slip through the cracks.

2. Get to Know Your Patient

Obviously, the most important thing for you as a dental professional is to provide top-notch oral care. However, if you can balance focusing on your work with creating quality conversations with patients, you can build stronger patient relationships and a quality patient experience!

As the running dental joke goes, no one enjoys trying to while a dentist or hygienist is working on cleaning or treating our teeth! But it does make us more comfortable when we’re asked what we’ve been up to, how the kids are, if we’re enjoying work, etc. This advice applies to you and hygienists as well.

Ask at least one personal question before you start the work you’ll be doing. It can be as simple as, “How are you? Any fun plans for this weekend?”

3. Make Them Feel Like Your Only Patient

It is completely reasonable to have a day of unexpected interruptions or drains on your time that result in your office being behind schedule. In any profession, but especially one involving patients, this is inevitable from day to day, if not every single day to some extent.

Your job is to do what the world’s greatest athletes do: make your job look easy! Even if you are running an hour behind and feeling the stress, try to focus on your patient and act calm and unbothered when their time with you rolls around. Avoid seeming frazzled, distracted, or ready to move on to the next patient to catch up.

As we will often say of a person with excellent social graces, “make them feel like the only person in the room.”

4. Ensure They Feel Heard

This goes hand in hand with the idea of good listening we mentioned already, but another point to remember: be aware of how quickly an expert voice can become dismissive.

As a dental professional, you have a duty to provide full and accurate information, but you can do so in a way that doesn’t belittle the misinformed concerns of your patients.

Sometimes, the thing they are worried about is the result of old household myths or misleading marketing. It can be frustrating when they seem to hold those sources in higher regard than your highly educated perspective. We get that!

Still, you can do your best to try to respond with empathy and understanding. This effort improves the chances that they both heed your advice on the matter and return to your practice again.

5. Check in on Your Patient’s Comfort Levels

This is likely something you are already very accustomed to doing in certain scenarios. If you are testing novocaine performance before administering a numbing shot, you will definitely be asking your patient if they feel any pressure or pain before beginning the procedure.

But we would suggest extending these check-in conversations to every procedure. Even if you are just measuring gum pockets, asking if your patient is doing okay will make them feel more relaxed. It signals that you are not only focused on their teeth, but on their comfort levels and desire to avoid pain, thus easing anxiety.

So much of a good chairside manner is about communication and connection. Along with your goal of providing excellent dentistry should be a desire to provide a quality patient experience while they are in your care. The result will be lifelong relationships that fulfill them and you, and that inspire good oral health.

To recap, here are steps you can take to improve upon the emotional aspect of your job as a dental professional:

• Study Up on Emotional Intelligence
• Get to Know Your Patient
• Make Them Feel Like Your Only Patient
• Ensure They Feel Heard
• Check in on Comfort Levels

We think you’ll be everyone’s favorite dentist in no time!