Effectiveness of hypnosis in controlling anxiety during dental treatment: Exploratory trial

With the evolution of therapeutic approaches to controlling anxiety, hypnosis emerged and is now also being applied in the field of dentistry. Despite this, there is still little evidence of the application of hypnosis in the field. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the use of hypnosis as an alternative for reducing dental anxiety in patients at a school clinic at a public university. The 39 patients underwent restorative dental treatments of the same complexity, where no intervention was applied at the first appointment and a previous hypnosis session took place at the second appointment. The instrument used to assess the patients' level of anxiety was the Corah Dental Anxiety Scale. The results obtained were statistically significant (p < .001), showing that hypnosis was effective in reducing anxiety levels. The Corah Dental Anxiety Scale showed an average of 5.58 in the session in which the patients underwent hypnosis, compared to an average of 8.28 for the session in which there was no hypnosis. Thus, from this study, hypnosis proved to be an effective strategy for reducing dental anxiety.