The newsletter provides up-to-date science information for dentistry with the latest results from the scientific world.

Research of today is moving rapidly ahead. Each week several hundred scientific articles are published in the field of odontology. The sheer volume makes it difficult for the practitioner to cope with the new findings. The idea with the eight pages long newsletter ajourODONT is to screen the latest published scientific information and make it easily available in dental practice.

Today five issues are published every year and the newsletter is currently available in Swedish but will be translated into other languages, i.e. English, German and the other Nordic languages.

Reports are selected from major international scientific journals and databases. The reports are presented as summaries with clear conclusions. The source is stated and the full article can be provided upon request.

One of the issues includes a report from a major international convention. For instance, this year's april issue covers the IADR (International Association for Dental Research) meeting, March 18-23rd , in Orlando, Florida.

This is the first article published from ajourODONT at ODIS and we are planning to bring you more interesting articles from the scientific world.

"Dental Treatment Challenges for the 21^st century"

Lecture by James Bader, Research Professor with the Department of Operative Dentistry since 1995, School of Dentistry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA entitled:

"Professional needs for dental care in the 21^st century"
"How can we dentists develop our skills as we near the year 2000 ?" opened professor Bader. "By acquiring better information i.e. knowledge about the evaluation of different treatment alternatives", was his reply. Professor Bader emphasized that today´s dentist must always raise the following questions when planning treatment:

What happens if I don´t treat the patient ?

What happens if I do treat the patient ?

If I treat the patient, what treatment should I choose?

What reasoning do we follow in our decision making?
To illustrate the need for better knowledge about dentists´s decision making, Professor Bader referred to an article published in 1992 (Shugars & Bader, J Am Coll Dent). Here fifteen dentists stated if they would, or would not, treat 13 different teeth from one patient.

In one tooth only, all dentists agreed. In four teeth, one of the fifteen disagreed. In six teeth the dentists appeared to be equally split as to whether to treat or not treat.

"Conventional wisdom"
According to James Bader, the reasoning for deciding treatment is actually often what we call "conventional wisdom". An example of such conventional wisdom, Bader explains, is

"…crown it before it fractures".

Now, asked Bader, what are the things dentists consider important, when asked to give a rationale for judging whether a tooth will fracture or not ? He asked 867 dentists to rank, in degrees of importance, eight common criteria for judging whether a tooth would fracture or not.

The results are tabulated below (Bader et al, Community Dent Oral Epidem, 1996).

The results show that dentists differ greatly in opinion about the importance of the various criteria. James Bader stressed that the dentists should not only evaluate their work regularly, but also take part in group evaluations to improve their understanding of the importance of criteria commonly used.

"What to do and How to do it"

Professor Bader finished his lecture by explaining that the quality of medical and dental care is primarily determined by two factors:

the quality of the clinical decision making and

the quality of the technical performance

To achieve high quality decision making we must discipline ourselves to evaluate our work within our own practices and together with as many other practicioners as possible.

För mer information om ajourODONT, besök hemsidan på: www.ajourodont.com eller e-posta: info@ajourodont.com