Boot Camp for the Dental Profession

As an 84-year-old retired pediatric dentist, I was very pleased to read Dr. Marielle Pariseau’s article in JCDA.¹ While I was still working, we urged parents to bring their children in at age 2, but I have been following with worry the trend of early caries detection and thought it was high time that somebody spoke up about it. I hope that the “boot camp” idea will take off. We have to do SOMETHING to educate parents and our own profession.

In my opinion we should also make an effort to include the medical profession in our campaign, especially pediatric specialists. While I was teaching at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, we made efforts to get preventive dentistry information included in the lectures of the medical students. However we received a polite reply, “Thank you, we already have all the dental information we need,” which turned out to be mostly related to oral pathology.

My personal solution to this problem was to visit the paediatricians in my practice area and distribute preventive literature to their offices. But that is not enough—CDA must take an active role, otherwise all the dental health improvements we achieved by the end of the past century will be for nothing.