Talk:Dentistry

everything2.com

• Regarding the link to everything2.com - I think the site is temporarily down. It should be up later... --Alex.tan 08:36, 15 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Sorry to have to reply to myself but a good writeup on the history of dentistry is here: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=15404 ... anyone want to rephrase it for wikipedia? Alex.tan 08:01, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Panoramic Radiograph

• I wonder if that huge x-ray image is representative of dental x-ray? In general dentistry the areas x-rayed tend be limited to a few or several teeth, in my limited experience (see dental phobia). A-giau 17:03, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• The dental x-ray shown is a Panograph, a kind of dental extraoral (film not in the mouth) radiograph using tomography. These are generally not used for a diagnosing dental caries because the image isn't sharp enought, but are for examining both jaws at once to evaluate impacted teeth, eruption patterns (children), trauma, identify diseases of the jaw, bone loss, large lesions, etc. LEN, RDH.

• The dental x-ray shown is also known as an "orthopantomograph" or OPG.
  -'Izz DDS

The concept of just what is representative of dental x-rays is changing, much as the concept of conventional photography is changing. Although the vast majority of dental radiographs, both intraoral and extraoral, are recorded on conventional photographic emulsion, the move toward digital imaging is progressing. This will continue to occur, despite the fact that current attempts to contain health care costs are not doing anything to facilitate technological progress.--
Mark Bornfeld DDS
dentaltwins.com
Brooklyn, NY 18:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

I tend to agree that the image leading the dentistry page should be a periapical or bitewing film. This would be much more indicative of that which dentists primarily use on a daily basis.

Myth

• Dentists have a higher suicide rate than any other profession. Percolator 20:49, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• Dentists are no more likely than the general population or other white collar workers to commit suicide. This myth got started in 1933; its origins and more recent data are presented in the Suicide Reference LibraryOdontastic

People's teeth in the UK

• Why do the British have bad teeth?

• • From what I have seen, British are no worse than the rest of Europe. --Burbster 17:09, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

• • The British do not have bad teeth, it is just the stereotypical image put upon us, similar to that of the British thinking that all Americans are hugely obese and overweight. Eternalnoob 16:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

And why do like 1 in 5 dentists have a last name like Hertz or Payne or something? Do they do it on purpose?

I know dentists whose last names are Meaney, Butcher and Pullen. -_-

Dentists and medical doctors

Why is the training of dentists seperate to the training of other medical doctors? Dentistry is surely just another medical speciality? --Oldak Quill 16:22, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

In its methadology, dentistry is predominantly a surgical discipline, and it would be difficult to argue for some objective distinction between the nuts and bolts of dentistry from that of surgery. However, dentistry is historically an offshoot of barbering and blacksmithing-- a sideline occupation that was at the time not suited as a separate profession in itself. It is a relatively recent event that dentistry was considered an occupation worthy of a distinct, separate profession. Because of its historical development as a profession independent of medicine, it is not considered a medical specialty. Universities that have both a medical and dental school commonly share pre-clinical basic science courses of study, but the classes diverge once the curriculum moves on the the clinical phase. Whereas the medical specialties require the completion of a medical degree, dental practice, including the dental specialties, entails the earning of a doctoral-level dental degree. These degrees are legally recognized as granting the right to practice solely in their corresponding professions-- a dental degree does not permit the practice of medicine, and a medical degree does not permit the practice of dentistry. (There is nothing to prevent a person from completing both a dental and medical course of study, leading to both dental and medical degrees. This is most commonly seen in the case of practitioners in the dental specialty of oral and maxillofacial surgery, where the holding of a medical degree offers the political expedient of increasing priviledges in a hospital setting.)

So, dentistry has come to resemble medicine as it has developed from a trade to a science-based profession by a process, to use a metaphor, of convergent evolution. This is, by the way, no different from the development of any of a number of other health professions, such as podiatry, optometry, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and a host of others. Although they may intuitively seem like branches or specialties of medicine, their origins were independent, and they remain legally distinct professions.--Mark Bornfeld DDS 14:26, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Some of this commentary shoud go into the article, Mark, along with further commentary about the "side effects" of the traditional division of "medicine" and dentistry...like the fact that health insurance companies can offer plans that they claim are "comprehensive" of all health needs while utter failing to cover anything related to dentistry, even medically nessesary dental procedures such as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon might need to perform. 70.20.238.31 03:23, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

External links

I checked each entry in the external links section and removed over a dozen. WP is not a web directory, and the fact that there are no paid ads here doesn't mean that we should carry unpaid ads. I left in place what seems useful enough, but I don't claim to be an authority. Rl 09:23, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

doctors and dentists?

A dentist is a doctor qualifed to practice dentistry

Is that appropriate, are dentists really 'doctors'? Would it be more appropriate to have something like:

• A dentist is a health professional qualifed to practice dentistry
• A dentist is a professional qualifed to practice dentistry
• A dentist is a person qualifed to practice dentistry

At least in the United States, training that is sufficient to qualify a person to legally practice dentistry requires the attainment of a doctoral-level degree-- either the Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) or Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD) degree. So, the appellation "doctor" when referring to a dentist is correct.

Your confusion stems from the vernacular use of the term "doctor" to refer to a physician, but such use is imprecise-- MD and DO degrees are but two of many doctoral degrees.--Mark Bornfeld DDS 18:16, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

This may be true in the United States, but in other countries its not necessarily the case (for example Australia and New Zealand). There is no MD, DO, DDS or DMD in many countries. In fact, dentists earn a Bachelor Degree in most countries. Is this not an article on Dentistry throughout the world, not just the United States?

Admittedly, I speak from my perspective as a resident of the United States; a dentist is a doctor in the U.S, and I cannot comment on the situation in other countries. Perhaps this is simply a matter of custom, or perhaps it reflects a difference in the training and/or qualifications of dentists in different countries. I invite anyone to provide additional information...--Mark Bornfeld DDS 22:16, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Ľ ľ Ň: As a resident of Canada, a Dentist is a Doctor. While the British system worldwide gives out Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS, BChD) or Bachelor of Medicine (MB) degrees, here in North America we are bestowed an undergraduate Doctoral degree (DDS or DMD). The word "Doctor" means "Teacher" in Latin, therefore, appropriately given to the PhD's/professors in the not-too-distant past. Only recently, Physicians are designated with that title and the general population's interpretation as such. Charles Lin, DDS, MBA. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.27.101.102 (talk • contribs)

In the UK, Dentists are also allowed to call themselves "Doctor", despite it being a "Bachelor Degree" I'd imagine it's the same in most other Countries outside of the US and UK.

Dentistry in Australia

The comment has been posted the "The current version of the article or section reads like an advertisement."

I would have to agree, and wondered if any of the contributors to this section can suggest a way in which unbiased commentary could be sourced to replace it. Would it be appropriate for the Australian Dental Council or Australian Dental Association to contribute to this?

This is true. I propose there are three choices here:

• Remove all the detailed information regarding those three universites - It seems like pretty useless information anyway.
• Or add information for the remaining three universites, and make it NPOV thereby removing the advertising. By talking aobut only 3 of the 6 universities, it looks even more like an advertisement
• The third option is to add generalised information regarding Dental education in Australia (i.e general information that is true for all the universities). We would remove all the biased stuff that currently exists. This would be far more relevent and would be more encyclopedic and NPOV would be easier to maintain.

I like the third option. Billyb 08:36, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions! Yesterday's version seems like advertisement. In Wikipedia, Advertisement is not allowed as much as No Original Research. Well, That's good idea to move all of advertisements. But I think that Dentistry in Austria is already mentioned in the article. *~Daniel~* ☎ 20:44, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Advertisment it may seem like, and it should be cleaned up i agree. But all of those universities and the respective dentistry courses are run by the same organisiation, that being the Australian Federal Government.

A query regarding adding a site link to the page "dentistry"

Hi My name is Jules Katz. I have created an online dental directory for Europe.

EuroDentists.

The only one of it's kind.

The site is free for people to find good quality, economical dental work in Europe.

The site is

www.eurodentists.eu

I had added a link on Wikipedia, under dentistry, under external links, at the bottom of the page.

Can you confirm if this will be of use to your members please and how i added the link was ok please. As i think it was removed.

I emailed Wikipedia and they kindly replied.

They said i should please post on the discussion page of the article so that i and other editors of the article can discuss its inclusion.

I would also like to write an article relating to European dentistry, and the advantages due to cost and quality, in comparison to other countries.

I find Wikipedia most interesting and was keen to place our site, within yours, to help others find more economical dental options.

Can someone please advise on the best method for EuroDentists being placed within Wikipedia, so individuals can learn more about dental treatments in Europe.

Many thanks

Jules

Jules-- Wikipedia discourages the placement of links that do not serve the goal of contributing relevant information. The intent of a link pointing to a dentist directory is not to convey information about either the practice or profession of dentistry per se, but to provide increased web traffic to a commercial site that promotes individual dental practices. This not only does not contribute value to the article, but also undermines the credibility of article content. The Wikipedia guidelines that apply are as follows:

3. A website that you own or maintain, even if the guidelines above imply that it should be linked to. This is because of neutrality and point-of-view concerns; neutrality is an important objective at Wikipedia, and a difficult one. If it is relevant and informative, mention it on the talk page and let other — neutral — Wikipedia editors decide whether to add the link. 4. Links that are added to promote a site, that primarily exist to sell products or services, with objectionable amounts of advertising, or that require payment to view the relevant content, colloquially known as external link spamming.

This is to take nothing away from the value of your site, but just to point out that inclusion here is inappropriate.--Mark Bornfeld DDS 23:41, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Dentistry throughout the world

I suggest a split of this section from the main article. It is mainly a list of oraganizations and colleges related to dentistry around the world. At least a consistent formatting of the section is badly needed. -- Szvest 22:21, 14 October 2006 (UTC) User:FayssalF/Sign

I think making it into a new article is a great idea. It would reduce the clutter of the article. - Dozenist talk 07:28, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree to it. I was looking for more technical (Medical) information about Dentistry. I dont need a page of information on Dentistry throughout the world. --Phoe6

I support this as well. Dentistry itself, the science of it, is pretty unrelated to that particular section. Switchercat ^talk_cont 02:19, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I too support this - I was rather disappointed by this page - when looking for information on Dentistry (of a more technical nature), this great long list of more irrelevant content was exactly the opposite of what i wanted. Therefore, I strongly support a move. Martinp23 11:03, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Support Too much info that can be split into another page, making navigation much easier. Jumping cheese ^Cont@ct 09:31, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Support KalevTait 16:37, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Support This article should be about Dentistry, not the various education facilities in the world that teach it. Billyb 05:08, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Support It would make the page a lot more readable. We have the magic of hypertext, lets use it to make a better article Ashley Payne 13:05, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I think it should stay w/ the dentistry article. I can't tell you as a research scientist how anoying it is to click link after link just to find an article that has nothing relevant to the topic. Keeping it on the main page just makes life easier.

it should be done asap...

The content has been split. Yay! - Dozenist talk 01:02, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

The title Dentistry around the world should be more appropriately named to World Dentistry Education.. Dentistry around the world would contain information about differences in philosophy and history of dentistry in different countries. however this appears to cover the courses and universities available to become a dentist. Furthermore (sorry to keep harping on about dental auxiliaries) dentistry education.... seeing as this is a dentistry page not Dentist page, should logically also cover auxiliary schools, a mamoth boring task which illustrates how boring this section can be. Bouncingmolar 12:29, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Dental Organisations

I am also happy that World dentistry has been split. I would like to extend this logic to Dental organisations as well. I feel that this adds significant bloat to the dentistry page and perhaps the page may become small after this proposed edit, but perhaps this could be replaced with some more relevant content ;) (Bouncingmolar 07:44, 13 February 2007 (UTC))

Article rating

I think clearly the importance of the article is "Top." Please, do not make me explain why. It is more than evident. Come on, the topic and the article share the same name! :-P And I would consider the quality of this article to be a "B". I do not think it would be considered a Good Article. References are needed. It also feels like some information is missing. On such a broad topic, you would think the article would be longer. - Dozenist talk 01:06, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Following the definition of dentistry in the american heritage dictionary, I think that the title dentistry does not adequately describe the content. As it stands it should be called Dentist not dentistry. This article focuses too much on dentists. Dentistry is also performed by the many Dental Auxiliaries as well. -Bouncingmolar 11:08, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement

• New topic: Dentist training - information about becoming a dentist should be excluded from the introduction and be moved to a section such as Becoming a dentist or Dentist training, as dds and american specific titles have no relevance to the subject title dentistry
  • this page should be nonspecific to country ie america. American registration and dentistry should come under the heading, dentistry in other countries. which may need to be retitled to something along the lines of 'dentistry education' (world can be omitted as it would be obvious by the subheadings that it is divided into region.)
• Dentist = Dentistry? Since Dentistry also covers Dental Auxiliaries and dental research, redirecting dentist to this page is perhaps either inapropriate, or dentistry needs its own page and this one should be called dentist, as this page should also include information about the other facets of dentistry other than dentists.
• New topic: The future of dentistry - to discuss research in dentistry or current trends?
• reorganising the order of topics: I think history should go at the top
• Delete Related dental topics. This section seems irrelevant to the topic dentist. It is just a long list of anything dental, people are able to look at the dentistry category. Also the list is not complete and if it was, it would take up miles of scroll bar. -Bouncingmolar 11:18, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Where is the section on dental research? Does the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Dental Research [1] have any information on the news articles about growing new teeth?

"Smile! A new Canadian tool can re-grow teeth say inventors" 6-28-06. Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton filed for U.S. patents in June 2006. His (Tarek El-Bialy, a new member of the university's dentistry faculty) research was published in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics. With the help of Jie Chen (an engineering professor and nano-circuit design expert) and Ying Tsui (another engineering professor) the initial massive handheld device was shrunk to fit inside a person's mouth. It is still at the prototype stage, but the trio expects to commercialize it within two years, Chen said. The tool operates on low-intensity pulsed ultrasound technology. [2] [3] Larry R. Holmgren 04:06, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

"Growth modification of the mandible with ultrasound in baboons: A preliminary report" American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, Volume 130, Issue 4, October 2006, Pages 435.e7-435.e14. Tarek El-Bialy, Ali Hassan, Tarik Albaghdadi, Hamed A. Fouad and Abdel Raouf Maimani

"Repair of orthodontically induced root resorption by ultrasound in humans." American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, Volume 126, Issue 2, August 2004, Pages 186-193. Tarek El-Bialy, Iman El-Shamy and Thomas M. Graber

"Effect of ultrasound on rabbit mandibular incisor formation and eruption after mandibular osteodistraction." American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, Volume 124, Issue 4, October 2003, Pages 427-434. Tarek H. El-Bialy, Abd El-Moneim Zaki and Carla A. Evans [4] Larry R. Holmgren 07:56, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Could this be an application or use of tissue "harvested" from aborted human fetuses? Larry R. Holmgren 03:53, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes. See Missing teeth section of [5] Larry R. Holmgren 05:21, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Proposal: Create a Separate 'Dentist' page

I propose we create a separate Dentist page. Dentistry definition (in article)=

the art and science of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of conditions, diseases, and disorders of the oral cavity, the maxillofacial region, and its associated structures as it relates to human beings

Dentistry should be about Dental Science. At the moment it is about Dentists. If it is contains information about dentists it should also contain information about other faculties of dentistry; dental auxiliary's/dental researchers as they also practice 'dentistry'.

Logic for proposal: veterinarian is separate to veterinary science. Therefore, Dentist should be separate to Dental science/Dentistry -Bouncingmolar 07:31, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Young Student Enquiry

Hi, I am very curious about what it would be like studying dentistry at the tertiary level (we call that university in New Zealand). At the moment I am currently enrolled in a finance degree (a bachelor of commerce) but I also excelled in the sciences at High School, making me wonder what I could use those skills for. Visiting the dentist the other day, we got into a very interesting converstion about what his job was like. I don't know if I will be happy in this particular career choice, but it something I am concerned that if I do not search into it more, I may regret later. I have very much a business mind, and a past teacher told me my personality reflects someone who is interested in dollar values, and although enjoys science, would not be content with spending masses of time figuring out a brainy maths problem for the simple joy of solving it. This is probably true, but does it mean dentistry would be wrong for me? And what is a good way for me to really get an appreciation of what it would be like without signing away my scholarship for business and the next (quite a few) years of my life? --NZStudent 20:21, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

As this is not discussion about the dentistry page I think discussion about this should happen on your talk page (Bouncingmolar 21:21, 13 February 2007 (UTC))

Dentists in popular media

Hi Bouncingmolar, Most of the articles contain references to the popular media references. I dont know why there should not be such a section in an article about dentists. The Yada Yada is an episode of Seinfeld that has a thread based on dentist. I dont know why it was removed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Leotolstoy (talk • contribs) 05:24, 19 February 2007 (UTC).

oh right you are! Sorry, add it back inBouncingmolar 08:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Question?

Hola, Does anyone know how much an avredge dentist makes a year?

Adios, Bobithry 00:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

In which part of the world? Figma 00:54, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, let me think o yeah te US!!!!!!!

Bobithry 00:55, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

First Dental School?

---

This article sites the first dental school to be in Maryland. from 1840. But there was a very small dental school operating in Bainbridge, Ohio, as early as 1828. The School in Baltimore may well be the oldest still in operation, and certainly much larger, but it cannot be called the first one in the world, or even the U.S.
http://www.heartlandscience.org/medhs/dental.htm

Unless there is some other criteria I fail to see, it would seem this small section need be corrected.

Related dental topics cull

I think this section is not needed. The Category of Dentistry can easily be used to find any of these articles. I say it should be removed.Bouncingmolar 04:43, 17 March 2007 (UTC)