Voleurs

Dentists have never been the most popular folk, given that a percentage of our patients don't actually want to be sitting in our chairs, hence we have become thick-skinned regarding adverse publicity. However, the scale of this has risen during and after the first pandemic lockdown. First, because patients could not receive emergency treatment, and secondly, when they did, this often amounted to a prescription for antibiotics, a practice credited with a rise in antibiotic overprescription, as detailed in Dr Wendy Thompson's superb November Guest Editorial.¹ On re-opening, dental practices were limited in the treatments that they could prescribe as a result of anxieties concerning the presence of virus in the aerosol generated by a turbine handpiece, with these worries continuing to the present time. Although I have argued on more than one occasion that clinicians should therefore limit their treatments (where possible) to those that could be managed without an aerosol,² I am unsure that that advice has changed working patterns substantially. Add to this the Government advice on payment, which had the knock-on effect of reducing the number of patients seen, therefore, there remains (adverse) publicity regarding patients being unable to get an appointment for a check-up and/or substantive treatment. We are, therefore, at a time when public opinion on the dental profession appears to be low, as a result of failure to offer treatment in the way that we did before the pandemic.