Contents - IADR/AADR

e taught to prevent and curtail periodontal disease in adults and reduce the failures and remakes inevitable
when this disease is unrecognized and/or untreated.
Is it possible that the practitioners of clinical dentistry do not recognize the primary importance of the
diagnosis and treatment of periodontal disease? The fact is that they seem to be almost totally unaware when
viewed as a group. If periodontal disease goes unrecognized and thus, obviously, untreated, how can prevention,
the optimal effort, be taught and practiced? You, understanding these disturbing facts, must rise up out of your
laboratories and studies and engage in the educational, political, institutional, and community efforts to make
the appropriate changes in the nature of clinical dentistry. We must become committed to the concept that it is
realistically possible to teach and effect the prevention of most oral disease. We must greatly multiply the
operative usefulness of each dentist, so that a slowly increasing dental manpower can deliver prevention and
dental health care which is available to all people. It is simply unrealistic to continue to deliver care to an
expanding population in which the individual patient requires the filling and the refilling of teeth and then
undergoes tooth loss and its replacement and finally complete loss and dentures. Twenty million denturewearing
Americans are living examples of this time-consuming demonstration of the failure of dentistry as it is
presently practiced.
To be functional you must learn what dentistry is in the field, evaluate what you observe in the light of
society's needs, and then, motivated and informed, help create and implement the educational, social, and
practice modes of our profession. I believe that many of the changes which may come, through government and
organized dentistry, may not be workable if your influence is not felt. If the "increase dental manpower"
approach to solving dental health care problems is an example of the efforts of others, then you had better
engage now with dentistry's problems if you really care about the prevention or treatment of oral disease in our
population.
Dr. Gies looked at dentistry prior to 1926 and prepared the way for the truly remarkable growth of
dentistry as a profession. Now we must look again and with greatly accelerated effort, effect the implementation
of advances in dental science for the benefit of the profession and the society it serves.
By example, we at Columbia who are members of the IADR have recognized our responsibility and
have taken steps to engage in solving some of the problems which I have been speaking about. What follows is
a summary of our approaches:
1. Develop and implement a new curriculum which stresses the correlation of scientific and clinical
information to produce a strong conceptual basis for prevention, recognition, forestalling, and
treatment of more disease in more patients per individual dentist. Because we believe that mere
increase in numbers of standard dentists is not satisfactory, our predoctoral program is designed
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR DENTAL RESEARCH (IADR) – THE FIRST FIFTY YEAR HISTORY PAGE 275