Techniques for reducing anesthetic injection pain: an interdisciplinary survey of knowledge and application.

Background: The authors conducted a study that considered family physicians' and dentists' knowledge and application of techniques to reduce the pain associated with anesthetic injections. They also assessed practitioners' discomfort with patients' injection pain and needle anxiety/phobia.

Methods: The authors designed a questionnaire about awareness and use of 10 techniques for reducing pain of anesthetic injection and mailed it to 2,000 randomly selected family physicians and general dentists. They analyzed the data to examine differences between disciplines regarding awareness and use of techniques, reasons for not using techniques, number of injections given per week, and predictive value of certain demographic variables on reported use of individual techniques and on practitioner reactions to patients' pain and anxiety.

Results: The response rate was 35 percent. The authors used the chi2 test for differences between disciplines' awareness of and use or nonuse of techniques, Wilcoxon testing to assess differences between disciplines' median values of number of weekly injections and logistic regression to study demographic variables' predictive values (P = .01). General dentists give more injections than do family physicians. Differences existed between disciplines' awareness and use of eight of 10 techniques. Disciplines reported cost and time issues as reasons for not using some techniques. Number of years in practice and age were associated with use of six techniques. Dentists reported feeling greater personal effects of patients' pain and needle anxiety/phobia than did family physicians.

Conclusions: Those not using pain-lessening techniques inaccurately identified time and cost as problems, suggesting that respondents may be less familiar with these techniques than otherwise reported. Further study is recommended.

Clinical Implications: Pain reduction techniques for anesthetic injection cost little to implement, are not time liabilities, and can lessen avoidable pain and reduce the incidence of needle phobia.