Abstract
A survey was conducted to shed light on how often restraint therapy had been used for the treatment of pedodontic cases in our clinic.
The subjects were new patients who visited our clinic at the Department of Pediatric Dentistry at Nippon Dental University Hospital in Niigata, from 1989 to 1993. The findings were as follows:
1. Of the total 1,478 child outpatients,138 or 9.3% received restraint therapy.
2. The average age of the patients on their first visit was just 4 years. Those who were treated under restraint averaged 3 years and six months of age.
3. A check of the number of times the child subjects underwent restraint therapy revealed that the largest 40.6% (56 subjects) experienced this only once. The number of these patients tended to decrease with the increase in the number of times.
4. By type of restraint therapy, physical restraint was the most common and was used on 89 infants. This was followed by V. C. (voice control) or HOME (hand-over-mouth-exercise) on only 49 and partial physical control on 26, in decreasing order.
Based on these findings, it was concluded that less than 10% of the patients were given restraint therapy in our clinic and that the number of times this kind of procedure was used was held down to the minimum. Presumably this might have reflected the policy of the department of pediatric dentistry which emphasizes the importance of a good operator-patient rerationship. Every operator working in our clinic has been told to do without restraints as much as possible except for use as an emergency mesure.
