The Four Fears
Next Level Hygiene: Team Materials
The Four Fears
We share the Four Fears here with only as much comment and background as are necessary to help you recognize these themes across your own experience.
We feel that these are not only the four most important areas of resistance to address when it comes to outfitting your team to make your patients happy (which in turn makes the practice grow), but are the four areas of inherent difficulty that the entire industry of dentistry must work to overcome systematically if it is to reach its full potential as a universally utilized caring profession.
Fear and Informed Consent
Mistrust and fear are what stand in the way of understanding the need for preventative homecare and restorative treatments. As you read this, consider how addressing the Four Fears might connect with your personal concept of informed consent, and that of your patients and your Team, and how overcoming these barriers might lead to better care outcomes.
Understanding Fear is Understanding Patients
As we cover in our clinical empathy module, The Dental World, it’s all too easy to forget what it’s like to be a patient: To forget what it’s like to see a dental clinic as an unfamiliar place. To forget what it’s like to sit in that chair without inside information about what’s happening. To not fully appreciate the consequences of putting off care. Awareness of the Four Fears in every patient interaction compensates for this and helps us empathize with our patients. It helps us “read their minds” a little, just enough to anticipate their unspoken questions and open up tense silences into caring discussions.
The Four Fears are felt in different proportions for each person based on who they are and their personal experience with dentistry. Some people, for instance, have had no cause to fear pain, but are preoccupied with the inconvenience of getting work done. Some people care most about the cost. Others are fearful most about not understanding the consequences of treatment, and will try to put care off until they understand the difference between the results of putting off treatment versus the recommended treatment, versus any possible alternatives.
Usually there are more than one of these fears at work. Whatever the individual is concerned about, it is our job to establish a rapport and an empathic connection so we can “get down to brass tacks” and notice, address, and assuage the fears that stand in the way of accepting our medical advice.
The Four Fears are reminders of the attitudes your patients are coming in with, and the perspective they will always be coming from–until, after a many years of being your patient, they have enough experience getting dental care without these fears to move away from them. This takes more or less time, depending on the individual.
The work each of us does in helping our patients overcome these fears by anticipating them, talking and minimizing the presence of triggers will help our patients, our practices, and dentistry at large.