Are there dramatic physiological differences between teeth/gums and the rest of the body? Or is it just tradition?
In: Biology
Keep in mind most doctors specialize in one area of the body, and aren’t experts in the entire thing.
Dentists are doctors who specialize in the oral cavity, for the most part. There are stark differences between the oral cavity and the rest of the body, but similar can be argued for any part of the body.
[deleted]
They’re different credentials and specializations.
And a medical doctor isn’t, say, a neurologist when they graduate. Your family doctor refers you to specialists because they have a broad but shallow level of knowledge. Your family doctor couldn’t perform surgery on your ankle or heart or give a prognosis on a rare case of cancer.
A medical doctor knows about teeth in general, but they don’t know about disease in depth nor how to operate on teeth.
And a dentist doesn’t know nearly as much medical knowledge about the body as a M.D.
When these professions were starting to get taken seriously rather than barbers moonlighting as surgeons, dentists were left out and were not taken seriously as ‘real’ medical professionals. This result in dentists forming their own professional institutions on their own.
In addition to what others have said, it’s also tradition! Historically there were medicine people who treated everything as best they could, including dentistry and surgery. Eventually different groups developed. Barbers, for instance, had the sharpest blades and scissors and became founders of modern surgery. Some of those deviated and developed modern dentistry.
Nowadays you go to school to become a dentist and all the surgical interventions that entails. If you want to do reconstructive/facial surgeries, you become a dentist and then go to medical school (though an abbreviated form) followed by a residency in OMFS (oral maxillofacial surgery) and even fellowship to further subspecialize. It’s one of the longest educational pathway in medicine. 4 years undergrad, 4 years dental, 2-3 years med school, 4-5 years residency. These folks are the orthodontists you see for facial reconstruction/super advanced oral surgeries.
One cannot under estimate the vast depths of knowledge printed, studied, and discovered everyday of every year in medicine. I primarily focus my energy and reading on neurophysiology. One of my favorite reads is a 1600 pg two-volume book set on the hypothalamus. Everyday, new studies and papers are submitted, many of which expand on or add to the dogma covered in those 1600 pages, but if you went to a specialist because you had a hormonal issue, I wouldn’t expect your specialist to have read every study or memorize that book, but I would expect them to make a decision that conforms to the facts and theories as if they did. The thing is that most specializations are just like this,
theres just too much info! Last week I picked-up an 800 pg book on mitochondria. Mitochondria! Its the powerhouse of the cell,
but still… 800 pages??? YUPPP. Tangently, there was a point in my life when I asked whether or not dentist’s are just as qualified medical doctors, so I asked my friend, a dental school grad. He showed me his textbooks and I understood… Would I let a neurosurgeon work on my teeth over a dentist? Hell no! They’ve earned their niche!
You could very well imagine a system setup such that dentistry is a specialisation of medical doctor, rather than something completely separate. And it would have some notable benefits, particularly in cases where dental issues are connected to other health issues.
As is often the case it’s in a large part about history, rather than what would make logical sense today. They’ve been separate professions for 100s of years, cemented when medical schools were setup separately for doctors and dentists. At the time, gener medicine was much less specialised, making the divide between the practice of dentistry and general medicine much more stark.
Today it seems likely that the benefits of merging dentistry into medicine are simply outweighed by the cost and disruption it would cause. Perhaps it would be worth it in the long run, but there doesn’t seem to be much public or political drive to do anything about it.
The separation mainly happened because of how the professions started. In the middle ages, Dentistry started with “barber dentists” who would amputate limbs, pull teeth, and cut hair, since barbers were the ones who had knives and scissors. Dentistry then spun off with Fauchard, a surgeon in the 17th century who turned dentistry into a trade. Making dentures and fake teeth made dentistry more of a craftsman trade which became more and more specialized. Physicians (mostly surgeons at this point) would keep amputating limbs and offering other remedies like blood letting. At this point dentists were seen as masters of their craft and physicians were considered more “barbaric”.
More advances like germ theory in the 19th century and the discovery of new drugs like penicillin throughout the 20th century brought the age of modern medicine, but dentistry had already spent a few hundred years separate from physicians. Now we have separate schools, separate accreditation and licensing organizations, and separate professional associations.
There are other professions like podiatry that have completely separate training but also work in a similar area as physicians. Some podiatrists go on to have specialized training and do surgery.
On the other hand, the osteopathic medicine (DO) field has merged with medical doctors (MD) showing that different but closely related profession can combine together.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/02/04/dental-medical-health-care
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentistry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_medicine#Research
Latest Answers