Gagging: give the mess a miss! part ii - management

Very often we come across patients who have an excessive gag reflex. Gagging in dental patients can lead to avoidance of dental treatment and hence hinder the patient care. It can compromise the treatment at every stage, starting from diagnosis to rendering active treatment to the patient. This series of articles will outline the etiology and management of gagging. A literature search of PubMed, Cochrane and Wiley using keywords like ‘gagging’, ‘retching’, ‘dental’ was performed and all the articles till date were included. Additional articles were selected from hand searches of the reference articles of the articles got by the electronic search. The language was restricted to English.