Dentists Find Tax Unreasonable

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31762, 20 August 1968, Page 14

Dentists Find Tax Unreasonable

The dental profession must press the Government unremittingly to recognise that the rewards of private dental practice must be adequate, not only to make a demanding occupation attractive to recruits, but also to ensure that dentists could make a sufficient provision for their retirement, said the president of the New Zealand Dental Association (Professor J. Leß. Warren) of the University of Otago Dental School, in Christchurch last evening.

Giving his presidential address to the biennial conference of the association, he said almost alone among professional men, dentists were completely dependent on their physical fitness to maintain their income. At retirement, they had a negligible asset in their practices. “A dental practice is the man himself,” Professor Warren said. “There is no sign in the present unreasonable taxation of professional incomes that the Government recognises facts of this kind.”

Referring to new goals, he said there was a need to show actively the profession’s constant concern for the public interest.

There was a need to seek to enjoy with the public a reputation for self-discipline, for fairness in negotiation and for promoting health for its own sake. “Being a profession given more to doing things than to writing about them, we have been slow to learn the art of presenting to others our knowledge, our skills and our ideals of service,” Professor Warren said.

To compete successfully for recruits in an increasingly competitive market, the profession must attune itself to the ambitions of young people, he added. The student coming to dentistry today was free to

venture into the field of applied psychology in a way that former students never were. Professor Warren said. “Biochemistry, immunology and genetics are as relevant for dentistry as for medicine,” he said. “So are the behavioural sciences. “But for some time yet the undergraduate dental course must continue to be in itself a reasonably sufficient basis of general practice, since our profession has travelled only a short distance along the road of post-graduate training. “Internships are a possible next step, but that innovation must be preceded by the full development of our hospital dental departments.”

Professor Warren said the dental profession must look to new goals as well as to the old. As the sphere of private and personal responsibility had contracted, so must the profession expand its sphere of corporate responsibility—in its dealings with the public, with Government and In international relations. “As long as dental treatment shall be necessary, den;tal practice will remain a re lationship between two [people—the dentist and his ■ patient,” he said. “It is in this i relationship that each of us [must seek that sense of fulfilment which puts the seal I on his professional life.”