Who should read this book?
This textbook has been written for the practicing dentist,
dental hygienist, dental assistant, and those students who
aspire to enter the rewarding profession of dentistry. It is
also meant to be a resource for dental educators. It is
written in such a way that even patients interested in
learning more about preventive dentistry should be able
to easily understand this book: it is not a research text or
complicated clinical manual. As with most clinical text-
books in dentistry, however, the current literature has
been reviewed and cited. Each chapter discusses the
current state of knowledge, with numerous practical sug-
gestions for the private practice setting and discussions
as to which products have been successfully used in pre-
ventive dentistry. A public health approach to managing
dental disease in the population as a whole is occasion-
ally mentioned in this book, but this is not its focus.
Nevertheless, community dentistry students and Public
Health Dentists would find this a useful text to learn
about preventive procedures that might be adapted from
the private practice setting to a public health setting. The
main goal of the book is to bring to the reader new con-
cepts not covered in other texts in dentistry and intro-
duce the reader to new approaches to preventing dental
diseases, especially dental caries.
What is preventive dentistry?
Preventive dentistry has its roots from the Latin terms
‘praevenire,’ which means ‘to anticipate’ and ‘dens,’ which
is the word for tooth. Dentists and their team members
strive every working day to ‘anticipate’ what could hap-
pen to their patients’ teeth and supporting structures.
To predict whether a subject under observation will end
up with damaged or diseased oral tissues, diagnosing the
presence or absence of disease and then assessing risk
for future disease, is required. These topics are discussed
in Chapters 2 and 15, respectively.
In Chapter 1, the introduction chapter, we discuss the
various levels of prevention. This book endeavors to
review the best methods for primary prevention of dental
disease: through primary prevention it is possible with
intervention to ‘anticipate’
disease and
prevent it alto-
gether. Comprehensive
preventive dentistry also includes
intervening early,
when the disease is just starting, and
returning the subject to good health. This is
secondary
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