Doctors

Six Tips for Dental Professionals to Improve Their Mental Health

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Dental professionals face numerous stressors in their day to day work including reimbursement concerns, practice management issues, financial pressures, paperwork demands, uncooperative patients, physical demands inherent in delivering oral health care, and tightly booked schedules. Dental professionals often have personal characteristics like perfectionism and prioritization of others’ needs that in conjunction with the day to day work stressors can lead to dental professionals vulnerable to distress, burnout, and mental health disorders. This stress endemic is discussed in the article “Anxiety, depression, and the impact on dental health care workers,” written by Maria L. Geisinger and Stacey L. Dershewitz appearing in the Journal of the American Dental Association (vol. 153, no. 8, pp. 734-736, Aug. 01, 2022). The article also discusses how dental professionals can improve identifying and preventing mental health disorders. The authors feel that mental health disorders can have … Read more

Pediatric Dentists Can Benefit from Improving their Image Interpretation Skills

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An interesting study titled “Does clinical experience with dental traumatology impact 2D and 3D radiodiagnostic performance in paediatric dentists? An exploratory study” appears in the BMC Oral Health written by Gertrude Van Gorp and et al. (vol. 22, no. 245, 2022). The article seeks to explore the performance of pediatric dentists when identifying and detecting traumatic dental injuries on both 2D and 3D images. In the study the authors analyzed data from nine pediatric dentists (six female and three male) who had used structured scoring sheets to randomly assess 2D and 3D images of anterior permanent teeth with dental trauma. The researchers analyzed the level of experience with traumatic dental injuries on imaging, identification, and interpretation of lesions. The authors compared these results to benchmark data from expert consensus of an experienced dentomaxillofacial radiologist and pediatric endodontist. Six of of … Read more

Numb chin syndrome: what dentists should know

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An interesting article titled “Numb chin syndrome: What all oral health care professionals should know,” written by Christina Perez and et al. appears in the Journal of the American Dental Association (published May 26, 2022). The article discusses the rare sensory neuropathy of the mental nerve called numb chin syndrome (NCS) and to inform oral health professionals and dentists of the clinical characteristics since they may be the first to encounter it in their patients. In the article the authors found a total of 2,374 studies in PubMed and the Cochrane Library. Based on the authors inclusion and exclusion criteria 102 articles were left. From these 102 articles, 8 studies were observational, 85 were case reports, and nine were letters to the editor. The articles included 288 patients which the authors performed descriptive statistics on. This resulted in numb chin … Read more

Is Dentistry in an Uphill Battle Against Dr. Google?

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During the February 2022 Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting Dr. Gregory Psaltis gave an interesting talk titled “Dealing with Dr. Google.” Dr. Psaltis presented how nowadays patients are turning to internet searches to seek information on scientific topics and in particular their dental treatments. Based on what the patients find online this can cause them and their parents to challenge any recommendations. In the talk Psaltis said how parents of young dental patients these days are arriving at dental practices and don’t agree with the recommendations the dentist suggests. He presented four such scenarios including that parent’s do not want x-rays for their child, that parent’s do not want flouride for their child, that parent’s only want tooth-colored crowns—not silver (stainless steel) for their child, and that parent’s only want only fillings for large lesions and never any crowns for … Read more

Orthodontist Sentenced to Prison for Public Corruption Scheme with Former State Senator

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A former Arkansas dentist who served as an orthodontist, who has since resided in Florida, has been sentenced to one year plus one day in prison and a $157,500 fine for Conspiracy to Commit Honest Services Fraud. This was due to the orthodontists involvement in a public corruption scheme that involved a former state senator in the state of Arkansas. The former orthodontist entered into a plea agreement where he plead guility and admitted to hiring the former state senator to influence and request official action to benefit his dental clinics. The orthodontist owned and operated several orthodontic clinics in Arkansas. He found himself in trouble in 2013 when he was accused by state regulators of allowing his dental hygienists to provide services to patients who were not receiving any orthodontic treatment. At the time a state law known as … Read more