Dentistry and COVID-19 – Time to Rethink our Prescribing Patterns?

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has forced changes in many aspects of working practices and none more so than in clinical dentistry. I would like to offer my congratulations to the Dental Update team for providing articles that are relevant to the ‘new ways of working’.

Of particular interest is the dentistry that we, as practitioners, can provide without recourse to the turbine and aerosol generating procedures (AGPs), and I believe that COVID-19 obliges us to reconsider what our aims of treatment are with respect to restorative dentistry.

The restorative options open to a practitioner are many and varied and yet there is a fundamental question that a practitioner needs to ask when considering the holistic approach to oral health – ‘What am I trying to achieve in restoring this tooth?’¹

It is known that there will be much variation between dentists as to how best to treat a tooth and this variation will essentially stem from the practitioner's view as to what is required to achieve longevity for both the tooth and the restoration. We, as dentists, are being asked to predict the future. I suspect that there is an overwhelming urge for dentists to recreate the original shape of the tooth in question without giving consideration to the various factors that may be unique to that patient and that tooth. It is necessary to put the W into the Hole! Not to look at the HOLE in the tooth but the WHOLE patient. Ideally, we would wish to restore Form, Function and Features, but in the real world this is not always possible, and so the question needs to be asked – ‘What do I do here?’²