Some sections of the media are clearly not averse to myth making at the expense of dentists.
We’re not short of colourful stories that not only cut the profession short, but often fly in the face of patient safety, government policy and scientific fact.
And from non-existent league tables to ‘root out rotten dentists’, to consistent doom mongering over amalgam and fluoridation, the dental profession has to contend with bad headlines and more than a few dreadful puns.
So on Friday we were quick to respond to Helen Rumbelow’s suggestion in The Times that dentists may have morphed from healthcare professionals to overzealous crusaders.
“I have a fear of dentists” she writes “but not for the reasons you think (drilling, Marathon Man).It’s their moral high horse.”
“They…remind me of Catholic priests from half a century back” she writes. “Dentists make you feel ashamed. For every sin of the flesh, their answer is “floss”, or “more flossing”. You stagger out, castigating yourself, and that night you will floss in a bloody, drooling fury like a Catholic sinner flailing themselves with a cat-tail whip.”
That, in part, is her reaction to a very busy week at the BDA responding to Public Health England’s new data that showed one in eight children under 3s now have decayed, missing or filled teeth. She rightly calls for more to be done in at school and at home. But she also points the finger at hectoring on floss that she has mistaken for dental ‘orthodoxy’. She concludes quite bluntly: “isn’t it time to change the script?”
You can read a slimmed down version of our response in today’s Times (full text below). Helen Rumbelow raises some interesting and very valid points, but in her trenchant views on flossing she overlooks the reality that many dentists desperately want to change that script too.
Dentists are struggling with underfunding and overregulation. We want a new relationship with patients – with a focus on prevention that’s such a struggle under the current contract arrangements. We have to shift the focus from treatment to prevention, so dentists can be compensated not just for patching up sick mouths but as partners, working to ensure the highest level of oral health in their patients.
We know that any healthcare profession must expect robust, even bruising scrutiny from the press. But at the BDA we know it’s important to set the record straight.
Our letter to the Times – Uncut:
Sir,
Helen Rumbelow is a little unfair in confusing the dedication of dental professionals with the zealotry of moral crusaders. (Ignore the high priests of dental righteousness, Times, 3rd October 2014, pg 28)
Under-resourced and over-regulated our dentists are walking a tightrope, trying to provide the best possible care for their patients and trying to hold back the sometimes debilitating – but nearly always preventable disease that is tooth decay.
Now we discover that one in eight three-year-olds has decayed, missing or filled teeth. The dentist chair is no pulpit, but it offers one of the precious few opportunities to emphasise the key messages that simply aren’t being delivered elsewhere.
But yes, that script does need changing. Dentists would welcome a new relationship, rooted in maintaining the best possible oral health in their patients, with a focus on prevention, something which the current dental contract does not fully allow. Whilst we welcome the piloting of new contract models we are dismayed that recommendations from Professor Jimmy Steele on modernising NHS dentistry have now been under consideration for five years and seem to have been stalled until no one knows when.
What we need is a joined up preventive approach – focusing on what parents, educators, healthcare workers, food retailers and government can achieve together. We all know prevention is better than cure, and that means addressing issues such as funding, fluoridation and sugar controls.
Mick Armstrong, Chair, Principal Executive Committee, British Dental Association