education

Easing the Burden of Undergraduate Education Costs such as being awarded scholarships like one from Nancy Etz

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For those who are considering additional education beyond undergraduate education, the costs can really start to add up. According, to the article “Considering Students’ Cost of a Dental Education: Return on Investment and Debt to Income Ratio” appearing in the Journal of Dental Education (vol. 81, no. 8, Aug. 2017, eS28-eS32), written by Allan J. Formicola, 28% of students graduating from dental school had debt of between $200,000 and $300,000. Even so, with such staggering amounts of debt for some students, most feel that the economic return of having a dental degree exceeds the costs of paying to acquire. Although at some point in the future this may no longer be the case. For those, who want to attend graduate level education like law, medical, and dental school, after undergraduate education, it makes sense to begin thinking about costs at … Read more

What is the Better Name: Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon or Oral and Facial Surgeon?

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An interesting article titled “What Name Best Represents Our Specialty? Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon Versus Oral and Facial Surgeon” appears in the 2016 edition of the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery written by Guerrero et al. (vol. 75, pp. 9-20). The article addresses if a better name than the current oral and maxillofacial surgeon exists to increase recognition of the profession by the public and other medical doctors. The professional group for oral and maxillofacial surgeons in the U.S. is the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (AAOMS). This group has long been discussed on this site see for example the posts Upcoming Changes to JOMS and AAOMS in 2014 and Advocacy White Paper on Third Molar Surgery by AAOMS. In recent years AAOMS has created a website over at https://myoms.org/ to educate the pubic about the full … Read more

How Can Dentists Better Set Expectations About their Career Choices to Avoid Couples Therapy?

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Dentists these days are graduating with ever increasing amounts of debt as a result of loans needed to graduate from dental school. This topic has been covered before on this site such as in the post Will Dental School Debt Lead to Future Counseling?. Such debt may take a heavy toll on dentists and the patients they serve. One way debt from dental school can adversely impact a dentist is in his or her romantic relationships. This is touched on in the post Divorce and Dentistry: Repairing Broken Relationships. In this post one of the common contributors to divorce for dentists is their spouse not having clear expectations about work and finances. A new dentist may take many years of paying down debt before there is money left over for nice houses and fancy vacations. Perhaps if the spouse or … Read more

Shared decision making in cases of conflicted evidence

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An interesting article titled “When clinical evidence is conflicted, who decides how to proceed? An opportunity for shared decision making,” appears in the October 2015 issue of JADA (vol. 146 issue 10, pp. 713-714) and written by Arthur H. Friedlander and et al. The article discusses the concept of shared decision making “…particularly necessary in dentistry at this juncture, given recommendations but inconclusive data available to support abandoning the provision of prophylactic antibiotics to patients with total joint prostheses.” I have previously talked about shared medical decision making in the blog post The Well Informed Patient http://blog.teethremoval.com/the-well-informed-patient/. The article talks about how historically patients were expected to consent to the recommendations of their doctors without much discussion. However, since this is not enough to be legally and ethically correct shared decision making can be used which is a “…collaborative process encouraging patients … Read more

Reads like a Dentist’s Advertisement

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I periodically like to check out the wisdom tooth page over on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_tooth Recently I came across the talk page which has an interesting comment near the bottom written on September 3, 2012, “There is very little discussion of how common it is to have wisdom teeth, and how often wisdom teeth pose no problems if left alone. Nor is there adequate discussion of how often extraction is necessary when they do pose problems. Some lip service is paid to it in the “controversy” ghetto, but in the end the discussion of the “controversy” is equivocating and unclear. As a whole, the article conjured up the image of an eager, pushy dentist insisting that, “Yeah, buddy, wisdom teeth are a huge problem! It may not seem like it, but it’s bad – trust me, I know these things – … Read more