It’s quite unusual to associate dentistry with clowns. However incorporation of clowns into dental practice for kids has proven to be effective in the past few decades & is growing rapidly worldwide.
A clown can be concisely defined as a performer whose act is to exhilarate & distract people. And now this has been incorporated into the realm of health care systems.
In 1970s, Patch Adams considered the first hospital clown. Since 1986, the clown care became quite prevalent across many countries to meet the psychosocial needs of the hospitalized paediatric & adult patients as well.
Their goal was to help the patients get accustomed to their surroundings, distraction from agitated procedures & perceive the significance of their treatment.
Role of clowns in dentistry
Being a patient is not an easy experience. It involves numerous stages of apprehension, uneasiness or anxiety of the procedure to be carried out. Dental clown provides physical ease & relaxation to the patients by enrolling them into play & this has an impact on process of acquiring knowledge & understanding through thought, experience & the senses.
Their interaction with the little ones motivates them to develop additional skills, learn new techniques & boosts up their confidence by inducing positive stimulation.
The prime objective of clown therapy in dental treatment is to distract & entertain the children & their families. Also, their role is to spread dental awareness amongst children & their parents.
Most of the times, kids have an innate fear may be due to any past experiences or experienced stories had been told by their relatives. Needle phobia & airotor sounds send chills down their spine.
Dental clowns using their holistic approach connect easily with the little ones & make them as comfortable as possible & contribute towards their psychosocial well being, handling & recovery process.
This somewhere alleviates their anxiety or stress level & ensures children to cope well with the dental treatment. The clown therapy helps the little ones to concentrate on something other than their anxiety & treatment.
Also, the dental clowns they amalgamate creative skills like puppetry, comedy, music, magic etc, which further helps in evoking affirmative emotions with distinctive qualities such as ability to understand & share the feelings & emotional intelligence.
How dental clown help kids calm their anxiety & make them understand their illness
Dental clown with the help of play tries to distract & draw everyone’s attention towards the message he is trying to convey.
Being a clown, he can enact the role without inducing a feeling of menace in the patient because the kids never relate him with a person. So it’s improbable for the kids to confuse the imaginary world of clown with reality.
For example an eight year old boy has pain in his 1st molar due to caries. Dental clown assists to make him comfortable by enacting any of his favourite super heroes & referring to the carious tooth to an offender of the super hero & let him imagine that to fight the offender his superhero will need several equipments. Dental clown explains him how the criminal will eat away all his teeth & affect him if not killed on time. This let the child portray an imaginary world & this helps him to cooperate well with the dental treatment which would be unmanageable otherwise.
Clown to the children serves as a model that permits them to follow or chase their fantasy within regulated surroundings via humour & dramatic means.
Conclusion
The gimmicky concept of dental clown is an ingenious approach as it works in situation of continual stress in which involvement are needed to calm & comfort the patient not only with clown’s dexterity, intuition & responsiveness but also curative vision.
Their efforts are conceptually complicated or detailed. Along with entertaining the kids & their families they play a significant role in spreading the awareness & help them cool their jets prior & during the treatment which leads to a positive impact on health improvisation & quality of life.
