Caries management decision: Influence of dentist and patient factors in the provision of dental services

Diagnosis of the early carious lesion

“…38 Length of experience also contributes, with experienced examiners having higher sensitivity, higher specificity and greater reproducibility than those less experienced. 39 Due to the lack of a single detection method that provides both high sensitivity and high specificity, combining a number of methods is recommended to increase the accuracy of detection.…”

Minimal intervention dentistry: part 1. From 'compulsive' restorative dentistry to rational therapeutic strategies

“…This 'rational' model of care is known as minimal intervention dentistry and is applicable not only to cariology but to periodontology and all other areas of dentistry. [1][2][3] Studies conducted in France in the early 2000s indicated that dental practitioners had not yet integrated this concept of cariology into practise [4][5][6][7] even though, since the 1990s, Elderton had already denounced traditional approaches to conservative dentistry when considered in isolation. [8][9][10] Indeed, traditional oral care, which comprises largely conservative/ operative dentistry, including scaling and polishing, has very little impact on the oral health of patients both in children and adults because the patient finds himself/ herself caught in a repeat restoration spiral of care, where successive replacement…”

What factors influence the provision of preventive care by general dental practitioners?

“…Evidence from surveys of dentists in Australia and overseas suggests that restorative care has been the dominant approach used to manage the initial stages of dental caries, which could have been controlled with preventive non-operative care. [11][12][13][14] What does preventive dental care mean to dentists?…”