Not With The Stoics

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30529, 26 August 1964, Page 18

Not With The Stoics

(N.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, Aug. 25. One of the leading dental surgeons of the world, Dr. H. Slcher, confessed today that for much of his career he had been scared of going to a dentist He said the psychological anticipation of pain left him finally when a colleague decided it was time he saw a dentist and took him to see one “almost literally by the scruff of the neck.” Dr. Slcher, who is 73 and regarded as one of the most colourful personalities at the Denial Association conference, was lecturing on the “problems of pain in dentistry.”

Bom in Vienna, where i he received a medical degree in 1913, Dr. Slcher is now professor emeritus and director of the research training pro- i gramme of the Loyola 1 University School of Dentistry, Chicago. “We. know how many patients come to us only if they suffer pain, and how many stay away because they fear pain,” he said. “When I was 7 or 8 I + had an attack of tooth- * ache and was taken to the I dentist who, in the style I of those days, had the ; forceps hidden behind his ' back.

“I was deeply shocked,” Dr. Sieher said, “and my mother had her work cut out to get me to a dentist after that. When I came to choose a dentist later in life I did so with two considerations uppermost—he had to be a good dentist, of coarse, but he also had to be a master of anaesthesia.”

Dr. Sieher said the sensitivity of patients varied enormously. Some could sit through dental treatment stoieially, but he retained more of a fellow feeling for those who broke out in a cold sweat and gripped the chair before an instrument ever touched the tooth.