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As soon as the first patient of the morning arrived, treatment coordinator Dee Schmitt greeted her at the door by name - "Hi, Sharon!"

Schmitt offered her water and other refreshments from the coffee and tea bar. Nearby stood a stone fireplace, plasma television and clean-lined furnishings fit more for the pages of a catalog than the waiting room of a dentist's office.

This is Allstar Smiles in Bolingbrook, which opened in October as the latest general and cosmetic dentistry practice to offer spa-like amenities to help anxious patients ease into their checkups. Schmitt can coordinate limo service for Chicago patients who want to travel to the suburbs for treatment. For one particularly busy patient, she also has picked up lunch for the trip back.

Allstar Smiles owner Sam Simos said the reception desk gets more use as a bar for evening events than it does as a place to check in.

"It's the Ritz-Carlton model," he said. "Dee's my concierge. At a fine hotel, the concierge will always come out from behind the desk and show you to the elevator and to your room."

Schmitt led the patient, Sharon Corgiat of Geneva, down a hall that doubles as a rotating art gallery to a "treatment suite," where Corgiat settled into a chair facing the woods out the window.

"Sharon, would you like the paraffin hand dip today? Or the massage chair?" Schmitt asked. Corgiat declined both, but before her cleaning, she ordered other items from the comfort menu: a cooling gel eye mask, a warm neck pillow and a hot hand towel.

A flat-screen television on the wall played underwater scenes. Some patients ask for headphones hooked up to music, movies or "Seinfeld" episodes to distract them from what's going on in their mouth, Simos said.

"Spa dentistry" is a growing trend - at the 2003 annual session of the American Dental Association, a survey showed that more than 50 percent of 427 practicing dentists offered some sort of spa or office amenity. In 2004, the University of the Pacific Dental School became the first school to offer a course on spa dentistry. One Honolulu dentist offers a "Hawaii smile vacation" combining cosmetic dentistry with a few days on the beach.

Dental spa touches are becoming so common that Simos prefers to distinguish his practice by calling it "concierge dentistry"; some dentists, he said, just add paraffin hand dips as a gimmick so they can claim the dental spa title.

Others even offer Botox injections and facial peels along with their porcelain veneers and root canals. Apparently, that's going too far.

"We think that's a distraction," said Allstar business development director Peg Simos, Sam's wife. "We focus on what we do best."

Chiann Fan Gibson, who practices at two Naperville dental offices and writes The Sun's dental column, said patients see any spa amenity as an improvement.

"When you have the nice aromatherapy, the neck wrap, the gloves with paraffin, something just soothes the mind, and the atmosphere is quite different," she said. "When you go to the dental office, usually all you can hear is sounds of drills, and people think, 'Ugh! Pain!'"

At Design Dental, Gibson said patients get the full spa experience - minus the fluffy robe. For the past two years, the practice has offered items such as refreshments, eye masks, hand towels and the choice of music or television while getting dental work done.

Her other employer, Wheatland Dental, is more of a traditional family dentistry practice. But it has high-end touches, too: digital X-ray equipment, neck wraps and aromatherapy.

All this extra stuff has got to cost more, right? Not necessarily.

Gibson said dental insurance covers general dental work, such as semiannual checkups, and some cosmetic work, such as veneers that need to be restored. If you pay cash, a new-patient examination with X-rays and a teeth cleaning at Design Dental will run $60 to $200, depending on the complexity of the work, Gibson said.

For a similar exam at Allstar Smiles, you'll pay $150 to $230, Simos said. He added that he doesn't itemize the spa amenities when he bills patients.

Corgiat, 59, first visited Simos at Allstar Smiles in January to realign her bite, replace her metal fillings with porcelain ones and cover her yellowing teeth with gleaming veneers.

"He just puts you at ease," she said. "It was sort of a grisly process when they took all my teeth down. No pain, though. When I went to the desert with my temporary teeth, I had his cell phone number on me."

She enjoyed it so much that she switched to Simos for general dentistry, as well.

Contact Katie Foutz at kfoutz@scn1.com

Copyright © 2006. Naperville Sun