Integrated Dental Treatment Planning

Book excerpt: Dentistry is not only about understanding the causes of oral disease and having the technical expertise to treat them. Patients frequently challenge practitioners with ethical dilemmas, psychological and social problems, health and welfare difficulties, and personal demands. This book covers the case histories of six individuals and the dental problems they encounter through their lives. Each case is loosely based on a real individual to allow the senior dentistry student to develop an understanding of the many issues they may face in daily clinical practice. Although all the patients featured in the book have problems related to oral and dental diseases, their successful long-term management requires both a profound awareness of modern treatment options and a broad knowledge of law applied to dentistry, the ethics of dental care, plus the psychology and sociology of disease and health related behaviour. Each chapter describes a hypothetical patient and how he or she presented, or might present, to a general dental practitioner. The various treatment options which could be chosen by the patient's practitioner are included and the advantages and disadvantages of the various treatment plans are described. The medium and long-term outcomes for that patient, in terms of their oral well-being, are then covered so that the reader can appreciate how even seemingly inconsequential treatment decisions can impact on a person many years after their encounter with the dentist. This longitudinal approach will help the reader to view dealing with patients' problems as a lifetime's work rather than as a set of "one-off" interventions.