• Dental Phobia Support

    Welcome! This is an online support group for anyone who is has a severe fear of the dentist or dental treatment. Please note that this is NOT a general dental problems or health anxiety forum! You can find a list of them here.

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D

duck

Member
Joined
Nov 13, 2005
Messages
23
What they call us? I have managed to get on and into (without posting and giving this away) a membership on several professional discussion boards, and the contempt and disregard that is shown by the dental "professionals" there towards phobic patients is disgusting!

They mostly call patients like us "PITA". That stands for pain in the @$$. Doctors and hygeinists both. I am truly glad that real pros are out there and that I will never, ever have the misfortune of sitting in their chairs ever.

Have the moderators have a chance to notice this????
 
I know the forums you're talking about. The atmosphere around there can be, ahem, very aggressive. I've totally given up posting there unless there's a particular dental question I'm interested in figuring out. I'd say it's not the norm - I showed that forum to some dentists and they were laughing their heads off ;D...

PITA patient is quite a widely used term, but normally reserved for people who really are a pain in the a** (like those who won't pay up). On the forum you're talking about, even innocuous behaviours or dental anxiety are labelled "PITA". It's not the same on all dental discussion groups, but those usually require membership (and you need to be a dental student or dentist to get on; unlike DT for example).

With hindsight, I'd say it's a case of "birds of a feather flock together", but when I first discovered the forums you're talking about a couple of years ago, I was shocked.
 
The biggest problem I can see is when these loonies decide to leak their "wisdom" onto more legitimate message boards. I watched a thread of this nature on a student doctor board a couple of weeks ago. Your assessment of "aggressive" was an understatement. Fortunately, that was dentist vs. hygienist. I would hate to have to deal with some of those trolls here. Thanks for keeping a clean set of boards and a positive site!
 
We've only had a handful of trolls so far, not a big problem to delete or ban (though I prefer not to, if there's any chance that they may have a legitimite point). Would you mind PM'ing me with which boards you were referring to?
 
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