"The Future of Public Health Dentistry: How Prevention, Policy, and Technology Are Transforming Oral Health for Communities"
By Dr. Mayank Chandrakar, MDS (Public Health Dentistry), Applied Epidemiologist Introduction: A Turning Point for Public Health Dentistry This is an exciting time in public health dentistry, at a historic crossroads. A profession that was once seen too narrowly as clinical and focused on procedures is now expanding into a discipline centered around population health, prevention by design, and data-informed decision making at the intersection of healthcare in tandem with education policy/community development. Dentistry has existed for decades essentially within the walls of a dental chair—treating pain, filling cavities, extracting teeth beset with disease and restoring oral function one patient at a time. This curative model, however effective in many cases, is not enough to reduce the global burden of oral diseases. Today, a paradigm shift is underway. Oral health has been separated from regular health no longer. There is also substantial scientific evidence that oral diseases are as...