“If you do that, you’ll push the teeth off the bone support and lose teeth.”
“If you keep the child in a retainer, you’ll arrest the growth of their jaws.”
“You can’t expand the maxilla without surgical assistance or TADs, or you’ll cause teeth to tip and be lost.”
“That approach is discredited and doesn’t work.”
“You can’t expand the mandible because there is no midline suture… teeth will be lost.”
Do you accept them without question?
Do you assume the person making the claim has strong evidence to support it?
Do you assume they have peer-reviewed literature backing their statement—even when a dental academician from a major dental school once admitted that only about 8% of what we do in dentistry is actually evidence-based?
We’ve all heard these statements, and many of us have accepted them without further questioning.
But why?
“Dr. [Fill-in-the-blank], I’m trying my best to help my patients and be as evidence-based as possible. Can you provide me with peer-reviewed literature showing that what you’re warning about has actually happened? I’d really appreciate that!”
From my experience, this approach almost always results in the person being unable to provide a single case from the literature—or even from their own practice—to substantiate their claim.
How much more could we be helping our patients stay healthy if we all started asking these kinds of questions?
to “Imagine the impact if we all started asking these kinds of questions to better learn what is reality and what is theory.”
