Hate the dentist? Just have a laugh and relax

Nitrous oxide - laughing gas - has well known sedation effects but researchers from UCL have discovered that it also makes people more suggestible - could this mean that nervous patients could be cajoled into relaxing?

Laughing gas is often used by dentists to ease pain but these new findings may mean that dental patients can benefit from being coached to relax while breathing the gas.

Dr Matthew Whalley of the UCL psychology department said: “Nitrous oxide is one of the most widely used yet least well understood anaesthetic gases and until recently relatively little was known about how it worked inside the body.
It has become somewhat of a fable amongst dentists that patents under laughing gas are more gullible. Some dentists have even been trained in hypnosis and report that patients respond well to being spoken to in a quiet hypnotic manner. The UCL study set out to establish whether laughing gas does indeed boost imaginative suggestibility, which is a trait closely related to hypnotic suggestibility.

Thirty participants took part in the tests - some were given 25% nitrous oxide and some normal air, both masked with a sweet scent to disguise the possibility of laughing gas. Participants were then asked to imagine feelings like the taste of oranges or the feeling of linen and rate their own response. Some would experience hallucinated sensations, for example if they were told to imagine a sour taste in their mouth, some would actually begin to experience that taste.
“Many dentists use laughing gas to relieve discomfort in their patents, but our study suggests that combining the gas with instruction and suggestion to help them to relax and become absorbed in imagery, for example, might enhance the pain-relieving effect,” said Dr Whalley.

By Leila Sattary