Dental Waypoints
A little update on the status of my dental learnings is in order. We aren’t getting too hammered with courses until Histology and Gross Anatomy are added in October (then the real fun begins).
All of us D1 students have a class called “Dental Care Delivery and Oral Epidemiology” which we simply abbreviate “DCD.” Today, we took the midterm for DCD (the final is next week… huh?) There really is some valuable material in the class, especially with regard to enhancing and measuring the increase in oral health of a community. However, the structure of guest lecturers (sometimes two per session) means studying for the test is an exercise in adapting to many different styles of teaching. One particularly entertaining lecturer was a retired dentist who recently retired from teaching at the U as well. This guy is a really entertaining and unbelievably knowledgeable speaker. He has, quite literally, seen it all — he casually mentioned the characteristic signs of marijuana usage, bulimia, methamphetamine abuse, etc. Naturally, we had quite a few questions from his presentations on our midterm. My strategy for some of the questions I wasn’t quite sure of was to play clips of this fellow reading different answer options in my head. This worked sometimes, but other times all I could hear was “you bet your sweet bippy,” which was an expression he used to indicate that “you are darn right “X” is true.” It was entertaining, but not particularly useful.
Oral Anatomy demands a familiarity with literally every facet, contour, height, angle, eruption schedule, et al. of every tooth humans possess in their lifetime. Which… makes sense, since we are going to be dentists. Anyhow, we are given life-size tooth preps on which we must use hot wax to built up the correct structure of different tooth crowns. The dentist assigned to our bench is a young doctor of prosthodontics, and her waxing skills are unreal. I’ll be sitting there staring at my tooth, and I can kind of pick out what’s wrong. Then, I’ll take 20 minutes and clumsily try to bulk up a marginal ridge by laying down some hot wax with a PK1, flowing it with a dental explorer, and then contouring with a half hollenback carving tool. The results are not pretty. The wax appears a bit like an impressionistic sculpture of parts of a tooth. Unappealing to the eye and anatomically terrible. Then our lab dentist comes around to help out; in literally (LITERALLY) 15 seconds, she demonstrates how to recontour the lingual side of my wax-up and fix a few other issues in the process. My jaw drops.
Still have tons to learn.