Everyone has got a dental horror story to tell. There’s the one where the drill missed its target and slipped into the cheek. Or the agony of the anaesthetic that failed to work. That’s not to mention tales of half yanked teeth, exploding abscesses and stinking, rotten root canals.

It’s no wonder that our worry about going to the dentist seems to be universal. Research shows that pretty much everyone fears going to the dentist but more than a third of all adults have dental anxiety and a further 12 per cent suffer from full-blown phobia.

The bad old days of blacksmiths

It’s a subject that the Wellcome Collection has chosen to examine in its summer show this year simply entitled Teeth. The exhibition charts the history of the dental profession from the bad old days, when dental care amounted to nothing more than the yanking out of rotten teeth – something you’d probably get your local blacksmith to do.

“It was the norm back then to remain tight-lipped for fear of revealing the blackened horrors that lurked beneath,” says the co-curator Dr Emily Scott-Dearing. “We talk about the emergence of the smile – a time where teeth only become visible once dentistry makes its presence felt. This wasn’t until well into the 19th century.”

Some of the things Scott-Dearing has extracted for the show are enough to set your teeth on edge. There’s all manner of twisted metallic dental tools. There’s an 18th century etching of a child having its teeth forcibly removed to hand over for dentures for the wealthy. And an early version of the dentist’s drill that looks more like a egg whisk and would probably open a sinkhole in your face.

Why we fear the dentist

The final section of the exhibition, entitled Our Friend the Dentist, addresses why, despite all the breakthroughs in medical science, our anxiety remains so high. “Firstly the mouth is an extremely intimate part of the body,” Scott-Dearing says. “It’s internal and the teeth are the only part of our skeleton that is exposed. It’s also expertly connected to our nervous system, making that whole area fantastically sensitive. Plus, it’s about lack of control. Lying on your back in a dentist’s chair is an extremely passive position to be in.”

Tim Newton, a professor of psychology as applied to dentistry at King’s College, London, has been helping people overcome their fear of the dentist for the past 26 years. He believes there is a disconnect between our levels of fear and the reality of our experience. “There is a common belief that going to the dentist is very painful,” he says. “Nowadays it isn’t. It can be uncomfortable but it doesn’t normally hurt.”

Pop-culture portrayals

Newton believes a large part of our fear comes down to the way we see our dentists. “Often there is a distinct lack of trust around them,” he says. “If you look at portrayals of dentists in popular culture there are two types. There is the psychopath – think the dental torture scene in Marathon Man. Or there’s the slightly failed, misanthropic, detached cynic – think Ben Harper in My Family. Doctors in comparison get a much better press. They are often portrayed as kind of miracle workers, hugely kind and even heroic.”

Open wide… how to fight your fear of the dentist

A third of all adults in the UK have dental anxiety and a further 12 per cent have a full-blown phobia. Here, Dr Tim Newton gives his tips

Take back control of the situation. Work out what would help you and say it. If you want to take a break, speak up. If you want something explained, ask.

Write a letter to your dentist. Note down all the things that would help you feel more comfortable and effective in working with the dental team.

Discuss your anxiety with your dentist.

Make an agreement with your dentist on a little signal which means you’d like to take a break.

If any of the above go ignored, then look for another dentist.

Remember you’re not alone.: don’t feel embarrassed.

Research shows that 50 per cent of adults don’t go to the dentist on a regular basis and so by the time we do go often it’s because we are in very real pain. “Our experience of going to the doctor is very different,” continues Newton. “We know they will give us something to make us feel better and they probably won’t actually touch us too much. The dentist, on the other hand, is pretty much guaranteed to get right into our personal space.”

Psychological support

Twenty years ago Newton set up a service called the King’s College London Dental Institute Psychology Service at Guy’s Hospital to offer psychological support for people with dental phobias. Some of Newton’s patients are so scared they haven’t set foot in a dental surgery for 40 years. He uses cognitive behavioural therapy and other techniques.

“We introduce all the elements of visiting a dentist gradually over a period of up to 10 weeks,” he says. “We start with very simple things such as teaching them to be able to sit back with their mouth open just for one minute. For the severely phobic it might take three or four visits before they even receive their first bit of dental treatment and often then that’s just a polish.”

The service has been such a success it is now a global leader, employing nine psychologists at Guy’s alone. Newton and his team have also trained around 10 other services across the country in locations including Birmingham, Lancaster, Edinburgh and Sheffield. Newton says: “Finding a funding model has been challenging. Dentists get paid for the work they do. If you have a patient and you want to spend the first five weeks talking to them then that’s five weeks of work for no pay.”

Fear and loathing

There are people whose fear of the dentist is deeply embedded. People with dementia or learning difficulties and people with autism can find it excruciating. Charlotte Waite is a dentist based in Loughborough who appears in a film in the Wellcome show.

Many of her techniques are similar to Newton’s. She demonstrates her work outside of the mouth first, she counts down so the patient knows exactly when she will stop and she always starts off in a neutral environment rather than a dentist’s chair.

“I’ve had patients who are so anxious they won’t come at all so we have start by doing home visits,” she says. “But these techniques work really well.”

Every decade there is a comprehensive survey of the health of the nation’s teeth carried out called the Adult Dental Health Survey. The last one was done in 2009 and showed that people who are anxious about getting their teeth done report a poorer quality of interaction with their dentist. They believe that their dentists failed to listen to them or involve them in the decision-making. And as a result these patients, all highly anxious anyway, are more than three times more likely to feel they do not trust their dentist. And so it becomes a vicious circle.

Horror stories and the heavy-metal generation

A quick straw poll among Facebook friends reveals also that some of us do have fairly straightforward reasons to be scared. One friend reported a dentist dropping a drill bit down her throat so she had to go for an X-ray to check it wasn’t lodged somewhere dangerous. Another was sent home after a tooth extraction and when the bleeding failed to stop hours later her dentist was forced to reopen the surgery at 10pm in order to stitch her up.

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Why young people are losing their tooth enamel

According to Scott-Dearing much of our modern day fear is down to the fact that people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s are what’s referred to in dental circles as the “heavy-metal generation”. Our collective childhood dental memory is of a constant drilling as the dentist merrily filled our teeth with liberal amounts of an amalgam of mercury and other metals.

DIY dentistry

It comes as no surprise, then, to hear that DIY dentistry is on the increase. A combination of fear, the high cost of dental work and the availability of dentistry kits mean that the number of people treating themselves has risen massively. Research by Which? revealed that around three million people have attempted work on themselves of which 26 per cent have extracted a tooth with pliers and another 12 per cent have tried using a piece of string. Newton tells me of one patient who repeatedly tried to glue his tooth back in with superglue in an attempt to avoid the dental chair and in another instance one woman was so scared to get her abscess treated she stabbed it with a fork.

But generally, says Newton his job is a joy to do. “You take people from feeling embarrassed and guilty and rather silly that they can’t do this thing that everyone else can do and you can transform them. I get these lovely letters where people say ‘Now I’m happy, I’m finally able to smile’. It’s extremely rewarding.”

‘Teeth’ opens on 17 May at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE