"DO UNTO OTHERS"

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 227, 25 September 1935, Page 9

"DO UNTO OTHERS"

APPEAL TO DENTISTS.

EXTRACTION OF TEETH.

HASTY ACTION DEPLORED. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) NAPIER, this day. "Let us save serviceable teeth whenever possible, and above all let us do unto our patients only what we would have done unto ourselves," said Mr. R. G. Crawford in urging the need for closcr co-operation between the medical and dental professions and the necessity for a measure of conservatism in dental practice in his presidential address at the opening of the New Zealand Dental Conference yesterday.

After deploring the wholesale extraction of teeth without regard to the patient's future, Mr. Crawford said it might safely be laid down that the surgeon, the physician and the dental surgeon must advance hand in hand with their interchange of practical knowr ledge, their mutual esteem, and their consideration of one another, in order to meet present-day requirements, namely, the hopes and demands of suffering humanity, which arrest attention and engage sympathy. "I would now solicit your attention," said Mr. Crawford, "to consideration of conservatism in dentistry and medical practice against that of premature and unnecessary action, based as it is on hasty judgment and unwarranted ignorance of the principles of constitutional welfare. The dentist must develop a broader view of his duties and responsibilities to his patient other than that of the repair of the ravages of dental caries or the extraction of teeth and their restoration. Nature proves by experience her protest against the reckless extraction of teeth.

"Dentists and physicians, owing to their enthusiasm regarding the theory of local infection, frequently advise the wholesale extraction of teeth, and in some cases of perfectly sound teetli at that, without any regard or thought for their patients' future or for the satisfactory mastication of their food following such practices. It seems to be the practice of some dentists and physicians to extract teeth first, and if the condition of which the patient complains does not disappear, to look for another cause of the trouble," he declared.