by Leif Kullman
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I am subscribing to several discussion groups in Internet. One in Forensic Odontology and one called Oradlist with most participants working within Maxillofacial Radiology. The list in forensics is rather quite, but the one in Radiology is a very well used and a busy one, with several discussion topics weekly. For me it has become a must, more useful for me to use than for example the International Journal in Maxillofacial Radiology (even if I also like this Journal a lot and never should stand to be without).
And I think I have had a lot of use of being a member. For example, some months ago I had to take a fast decision here in Saudi about buying a new expensive tomographic unit to the College. I only had a weekend (Thursday to Friday) to make a recommendation to the University about which one of two by myself proposed units we should buy. I had not so much experience about exactly these units, so I put out a question to the list members. Which members had either of these units and what were their experiences of them?
Saturday morning, which was my deadline, I had got 7 to 8 answers from around the world and the decision was simple. Several colleagues for a couple of years had used the unit, which I preferred, and they were very satisfied.
In several other aspects I have also had use and gained knowledge by means of the list. For example, open working positions in Oral Radiology are regularly announced.
Another example: Some month ago, the person who started this list asked us if anybody had any survey data on percent of practicing dentists, who use digital imaging?
This is a very interesting question, especially for those soon going digital in their practices. Unfortunately it might be difficult to get reliable records about this subject. But let's check some of the answers:
From a radiologist in U.S. the following estimation appeared:
- Just last week in Chicago we asked six sets of dental assistant with a total number of 200 are you or your office use digital x-rays? The answer was surprisingly low but estimated to be 10-14 %.
A salesman/technician in U.S. responded to this answer:
- I'm surprised it was that high, maybe because the sample came from trade show attendance. I think the number was 6% in DPR "dental product report" last spring. The sample size was around 3000 replies. I won't see a 1999 number for a couple months. But would guess < 2% growth.
From a radiologist in Netherlands the following interesting viewpoints appeared
- It is also interesting to look at different countries, which can make a big difference in (relative) numbers of systems in use. In France, for instance, many more systems are in use (percentage wise and absolute numbers) as compared to Sweden. In Belgium more than in the Netherlands. It is a multi-factorial business, depending on the climate partly, a relatively large number of systems were sold in the more southern (Mediterranean) parts of Europe when the digital sensor appeared on the market. It was a great improvement in the warmer climate over conventional film processing), and also the insurance system influence(in France a digital image means a higher reimbursement than a film based image). The structure of dental care might be of importance(in Belgium most/many dentists work without a dental assistant; real time imaging is a great help in that case), also the tax regime (in the Netherlands the amortization for tax of digital equipment is more advantageous than for equipment in general), the dentist density in a country (you can call it the "spatial resolution of dental care" to keep the same terminology; the large distances between clinics in the less densely populated areas of northern Sweden make teleradiology a must).
I know this is not a complete answer to the original question, only a couple of things that came to my mind in addition to the earlier guess for the annual growth.
An answer from a Radiology Professor in Denmark also showed up, it was as follows
- I know almost all Danish dentists who have digital radiography. There are at the moment 55 on the list at our homepage, but we assume that maybe 10 more are installing right now. They are private practitioners except one or two. We have 2600 private practice owners in Denmark. This makes 2.5%. It's better in Norway. I just did a questionnaire study for all Norwegian dentists. We sent out to approx. 3900 dentists and received from 2187 (310 digital + 1877non-digital). Assuming that most digital dentists would answer, the percentage would be approx. 8%. Right now we are recording all this information from the questionnaires - what a job.
So based upon this answers I think I got a lot of information about how far we are today. As a specialist in Oral Radiology I often get the question from colleagues, if it is time soon to start up with the digital future.
Finally, dear reader, I am of course also a member of the ODIS
list! Many of the subscribers here seem to be general practitioners and that will give me a possibility to keep up to some basic knowledge in general dentistry, which might be very important for a specialist.
So dear colleagues, if you have time I recommend you to join a list. It is a very interesting thing and at once our world will be very small and easy to access in some manner.
