Many patients have such feelings as anxiety, fear or strain towards dental therapy. These feelings can bring about physiological changes, chiefly on sympathetic nerves, and in the extreme, can cause psychogenic cerebral anemia. For this reason it is important to lessen these feelings.
It is possible to do this with hypnosis, but there are many problems with this method. For example, the doctor's level of skill in administering this technique and the patient's dependence on the doctor must be taken into consideration. Therefore, it is not used very often.
Autogenic training diminishes sensitivity by autohypnosis, so it must be efficient because the doctor does no have much time to work with the patient to achieve an effective level of hypnosis.
The patients were divided into three groups, one group was given autogenic training, the second group was given Lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug, and the third group was given no treatment. Fingertip-capacity pulse and heart-pulse were counted as physiological saline solution was injected into the oral musoca. The results from these groups sugggest that the sympathetic nervous system can be controlled to a certain extent by a variety of fingertip-capacity-pulses and the patients complained less of pain on injection.
