Letters to the editor

I read your interesting Editorial in the recent issue of Dental Update, and your enthusiastic support of the authors' evidence from new research on vital pulp therapy facilitating, as claimed, a new biologically driven treatment protocol.

Both referenced papers are interesting but I would contest the newness of the approach. My DDS thesis (The University of Edinburgh 1981) and subsequent papers were virtually advocating an identical approach. My paper (‘Assessment of the pulpotomy technique in human first permanent mandibular molars’ Br Dent J 1983; 155: 151, and several others, by myself, in the 80s) gives details of my clinical diagnostic approach, the difficulty of making such a clinical diagnosis, as histology is unavailable, and the surgical approach using coronal pulpotomy in appropriate clinical circumstances. Long-term results are also given, indicating that pulpotomy may be successful in the treatment of the ‘painful’ deep carious lesion in adults up to the age of at least 35 years. The approach was predicated on the many papers (several cited by the present authors) also published in the 70s and 80s, which relate to the correlation between clinical and histological pulp diagnoses.