A life without teeth brings about limitations and can lead affect one’s mental and physical health which can be unsettling to conquer. One of the means to improve your life is through your smile and a common conversation between a dentist and patient about the available choices usually revolves around evidence-based care.
These evidence are retrieved through scientific research carried out on patients, and general guidelines are typically established from the data of these research. However, the issue with practicing evidence-based care is that dentists tend to take these research findings that illustrate the average outcome of an average patient. In reality, these results fail to address the challenge of each unique patient.
Therefore, in the recent TEDxBocaRaton seminar, Sreenivas Koka, a dentist specialist in prothodontics, shared his preference towards the practice of value-based dentistry. Koka highlighted that value-based dentistry has double entendre. The first part of value is our preferences, beliefs, dreams and aspirations. When a patient without teeth visits a dentists, there is a common emotional association with their values. They are either worried about improve their appearance or perhaps they want to function better or they just want to get rid of the pain. In some cases, the patients have all three concerns. Therefore, how can a dentist help to accurately rectify these identified concerns?
What questions should a patient be asking and what information should a dentist be sharing?
Participate in the upcoming QS Subject Focus Summit – Dentistry under the theme of “Changing Paradigm in Dental Education for Future Excellence” from 4-6 April 2019 in Seoul, South Korea