Why Dentistry Is Separate from Medicine

The real question is not why is dentistry kept separate from medicine. The real question is why dental insurance is treated like a luxury, compared to regular health insurance. The problem is that so many people are unable to afford dentistry, because of poor or no coverage.

Dental/oral health is crucial. You can die from dental problems. I will never understand why the entire dental industry is treated as if it is cosmetic or non-essential. Stress to your immune system and failure of major organs is not taken seriously, but it is a very real risk.

NHS Dentistry in England and Wales is one of the biggest hidden scams yet to be revealed. The 'Unit of Dental Activity' scheme encourages dentists to delay treatment unnecessarily to cover their basic costs. The sooner the UK government acknowledges that the current NHS Dentistry setup is not sustainable, the better it will be for all.

Dentists in the UK receive a bachelor degree, as do doctors. However it was a sanctionable offence in the eyes of the General Dental Council for a dentist to title themselves Dr.<p>This was purely a Dental Council regulation, anyone at the time could call themselves doctor, it wasn&#x27;t a criminal offence.<p>With the arrival of dentists from EU countries who were allowed to do so, UK dentists felt they were being put at a disadvantage in the eyes of the general public.<p>The GDC eventually relented with an announcement to the effect that dentists doing this would not be taken action against any longer.<p>But they clearly didn&#x27;t approve!

i&#x27;m very happy its under a separate umbrella. think of all the years of unnecessary education they&#x27;d pile on to dentistry and the bottle necks they would put up to raise the wages to MD level.<p>currently it costs 150$ to show up 10 minutes early for an appointment to be seen 20 minutes late for an interaction that lasts 5 minutes. and then i say &#x27;my knee also hurts&#x27; and they say you need to schedule another appointment if you want to discuss any other ailments. insurance covers 100$ of that, but I am under no illusion of the cost.<p>do we need to raise dental awareness? sure. do we need to put it under the bureaucracy and price fixing of the medical system? i dont think so

Do the math and you&#x27;ll find dental insurance is a ripoff. Additionally, while some people can&#x27;t afford much of anything, others who complain about the cost of dental care, buy things as or more expensive because they value those things more: Big screen TV for example. They don&#x27;t value dental care as much, until they are in pain. Then they expect an entitlement. People pay for what they want. Dental insurance is a subsidy, not insurance. Delta Dental of CA has over $600,000,000 invested in tradable securities. They didn&#x27;t pack away that much money giving away dentistry for free.

In the middle ages, the main practitioners of medicine were &quot;barber surgeons&quot;, barbers that were also surgeons and dentists.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Barber_surgeon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Barber_surgeon</a><p>Also, all this was done in a very unsanitary way. In fact medicine was unsanitary in the West until Florence Nightingale conducted an statistical survey showing that cleaner spaces had fewer mortality rates.

I just saw this week an endocarditis due to the lack of dental hygiene. None of us was properly trained to evaluate if the patients​ teeth were ok. Shame. Dental health is not even available in lot of public health system like the Spainish one. I&#x27;ll never understand why it&#x27;s treated differently.

Break a tooth on a Friday night and need dental work? You think, I will goto the ER and they can help. Nope, they will just give you medicine to deal with the pain until you can see your dentist on Monday morning. I am not aware of a ER in the DFW area that has a dentist on call.

Make sure to poke a very thin wooden stick regularly (daily, before bed, after brushing) between your teeth and marvel (or be disgusted) at the amount of plaque that comes out which you missed by just brushing -- honestly it&#x27;s an insane amount.

Even further on the fringe of medicine: opticians.

In Italy, until the 1980 dentists were medical doctors that decided to specialize in dentistry. It&#x27;s still the case for a large part of them. But now there are separate schools.

The most painful thing about this article (and the comments) is the lack of understanding that Doctor is a level of education not a field of study.

Let&#x27;s settle the dust! Dentist here; what&#x27;s up ?

Despite the article&#x27;s pretence this is some universal historical wart, I take it this is an American foible, another artefact of the arcane clusterfuck that is US healthcare?<p>In the U.K., dental care is available on treated on the NHS just like other forms of care.