Those agonizingly painful and much dreaded injections at the dentist may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a British researcher.

He has come up with a pain-free injection which is able to deliver an anaesthetic to the gums without the patient feeling it. The stinging sensation that normally occurs during these injections is not actually caused by the needle, but acid contained within the anesthetic as has been discovered recently.

The solution to enable the patients to not feel the jab has to be acidic so it can be stored for long periods and still remain effective.

Now Dr John Meechan, a senior lecturer in dental sciences at Newcastle University, has invented a syringe which enables the anaesthetic to be mixed with a neutralising solution just before it is injected into a patient’s mouth. This stops it being painful and the patient does not feel the jab at all.

Figures show that almost three-fourths of people in Britain are afraid to go to a dentist because of having a painful injection at the dentist.

These injections are usually directed into the gum or inner cheek just before a filling, tooth extraction or root canal treatment and can be quite painful. At the same time the procedure without it would otherwise be excruciatingly painful.

Dr Meechan states that this new idea has great possibility to improve the comfort of dental injections, which will benefit all patients who need anesthetics at the dentist.

The entire idea was to make dental injections more comfortable for patients and we’ve done that by changing the delivery system. This is certainly going to benefit a whole lot of patients to get the requisite treatment without the painful injections.