Talk:Dentist

Qualifications for dentist

I would like the graduation you will need to do dentist. SAXXMORE (talk) 20:56, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Bachelor of Dental Surgery. Hemiplegiaxx (talk) 16:22, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

360°

hi, you might have seen the spherical panorama. we (german wikipedians) implemented the nice little script into en.wiki which makes the 360° view accessable. if you want a deeper look into what's possible with this, you might want to check out → this tutorial i published this morning. it's off-topic, but it's fun, i guess.Maximilian (talk) 17:05, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Dentist are surgeon and not merely medical professionals

According to Royal College of Surgeons Dentist are regarded as Dental surgeon and not merely medical professionals. Dental surgeons are not auxiliary specialist but are primary specialist of the maxillofacial skeleton. No other specialist or surgeon deals with diseases of this anatomical structure. Please visit website of America Dental Association or Royal College of Surgeons website to clarify your doubt. Wikipedia is a open platform so please stop spreading misinformation and stop being disrespectful to a profession if you have no clue how the medical field function. Hemiplegiaxx (talk) 16:22, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Please stop edit-warring, provide specific URLs to back up your claims, and do not make the first sentence ungrammatical (the first sentence of the article should not contain the word "surgeon" twice). It is not demeaning to call somebody a medical professional, especially when they don't just do surgery. Definitions are very country-specific, anyway, so it's best to be as general as possible here. Graham87 09:08, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I asked for opinions at WT:WikiProject Medicine#Dentist. Johnuniq (talk) 23:20, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree that it is not demeaning to call somebody a medical professional. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:55, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

In many countries (most notably the US and England), the surgeon who primarily deals with teeth is called an "oral surgeon", or more broadly, an "oral and maxillofacial surgeon" (OMFS) [1] [2]. Dentists can sub-specialize as either of these, including some who actually go to medical school to become MD, DDS (or MD, DMD) prior to their OMFS residency (including at my institution here in the US). This is also how it works in other countries including India [3], The Netherlands [4], etc. Other countries such as Spain do not have this as a specific subspecialty [5]. Some languages (including nepalese and some dialects in India) use "dental surgeon" to refer to "dentist." [6] [7] But this is the English wikipedia, not the Indian wikipedia.

Not all dentists perform surgery. The idea of dentists as universally surgeons is an antiquated one, which predates the DDS/DMD divide, before Harvard established a dental school in 1867 and invented the DMD degree (doctor of medical dentistry) [8]. Nowadays, dentists who perform surgery are referred to as a separate entity (e.g. "dentists and oral surgeons" [9] [10], and Dentists more generally also serve as the primary care provider of all teeth-related needs. Many many dentists serve as primarily non-procedural practitioners and never perform surgery [11].

In our best available sources, the most common term used to refer to dentists more broadly is "healthcare practitioner": [12] [13] [14] [15] — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 00:04, 14 January 2022 (UTC)