[Kevin]

Originally Posted by tboparis

I heard it was more advanced in Europe... Not sure though....

IF it is, it has only been so in the past few years. And even then I am doubting it.

[CleoW]

Originally Posted by ghporter

That doesn't excuse the horrible habit of shutting up the baby by stuffing orange juice or Kool-Aid in his mouth.

Who says it does? What a jump in logic!

The point is, guys, we don't know why she had cavities, and it's silly to accuse the girl's mother of spoiling her teeth when we don't know the truth.

[mmontgom]

Originally Posted by ghporter

Welcome to the forums! Can you fill us in on your background? You first sentence quoted above sounds like a close paraphrase of the ADA and APDA's sedation guidelines. Dentist? Dental student?

I am a dental student at the University of Pennsylvania. Almost a dentist When I first got into dentistry there were a lot of things I was told ("highest suicide rate" and also "one of the most trusted professions"). The latter of those is true, the former is not. But in my training I have found that "trusted" is an interesting word because so many people hate us for a variety of reasons.

I don't like going to the dentist, it is expensive, it hurts, and can sometimes be embarassing. I'm not on a crusade to change the way people think about dentistry but I want to be a great dentist. I can only do so much alone though and that guy in this thread struck a cord with me because he is certainly not alone in the way he thinks even if I personally think it is totally misguided. Also the use of the word "muder" for what happened to that poor girl and what he thought was fitting punishment, really really bothered me as I have my own little girl and I am a dentist-to-be (may as well be a dentist though, I treat patients). Lastly, most of my classmates use macs, they are pretty sleek.

[ghporter]

I concur with your assessment of the use of the word "murder." And I have a child myself-I know how hard anything happening to one's child can be.

At our Dental School EVERYONE has a Mac because the texts are on DVDs and the reader only works on OS X. It's cool to see all those MacBooks and MacBook Pros floating around at the begining of the year!

My Gross Anatomy course got shoehorned into the summer, between the end of med school's use of the labs and the begining of dental's, and our faculty was a mix of anatomists, histologists (one of whom runs the dental school's anatomy program) plus a few from other departments. It was amazing stuff.

From the polls I've seen, dentists come in right after nurses (and maybe pharmacists-depends on the survey). Of course more people like seeing nurses than dentists because the nurse usually only has a syringe, not a drill! No telling where occupational therapists fall in that ranking-we still have to tell everyone what it is we do...