Journal of dental education
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There are federal programs available for both minority students and faculty. There are also private, state, and foundation funds available for minority students. ⋯ We have to create an environment in which people are judged on their ability. At the same time we have to create an environment that rewards diversity.
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A survey of fifty-one of the fifty-three dental schools in the continental United States provided information about pharmacology curriculum content and time allocation. Most dental schools offer a traditional didactic course in basic pharmacology, with about 50 percent of the medical school-based (MSB) and 75 percent of the dental school-based (DSB) programs providing additional pharmacology material in other basic and clinical courses. ⋯ The DSB and MSB courses provided more time for neuropharmacology and less time for agents related to various organ systems than the M-D courses. There is considerable potential to improve pharmacology instruction by expanding the inclusion of pharmacology in other courses, increasing the number of clinical conferences and discussions, and offering problem-based-learning sessions.
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New information tools enable us to leave behind a world of medical practice in which providers of all sorts have been allowed to operate in the face of avoidable ignorance-ignorance of many relevant details from the medical literature as well as ignorance of details about a given patient. Furthermore, the new tools release providers and patients alike from the "predictable and undesirable internal constraints" of the unaided human mind as it tries to process vast amounts of information in the course of everyday medical care.
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The clinical findings that dentists use to estimate the future caries activity of patients are imperfect. Almost invariably there are protective factors in patients who go on to develop clinical caries and there are risk factors that persist in patients who do not develop clinical caries. Therefore, the clinical decision process is characterized by a level of uncertainty concerning the selection of patient management strategies for caries. ⋯ We need to have a better understanding of how clinicians process clinically available risk information. We need to determine what additional risk assessment information will improve the clinician's ability to identify high-risk patients. We also need to establish whether there are differences in the usefulness of additional risk information depending on the level of experience of the clinician.