Dentistry invited me to sit down and talk about where our profession is heading. The conversation went straight to the thing I keep coming back to.
Somewhere along the way we stopped thinking of ourselves as physicians of the oral cavity. We were trained to look at the mouth as mechanics — teeth as units to be repaired, restored, replaced. Technically the profession has never been more capable than it is today. But capability is not the same thing as purpose.
The mouth is not a sealed compartment. Low-grade, subclinical infection and inflammation there do not stay there, and as a profession we have barely begun that conversation beyond periodontal disease. Immunology is not a specialist footnote in dentistry. It is the whole point.
That is what I mean by amnesia. Not lost skill — lost memory of what the skill is for. And for every year dentistry stays separated from the rest of medicine, it is the patient who pays for the gap.
My thanks to Guy Hiscott and the team at Dentistry for the conversation.