Camile S Farah, Consultant Oral Pathologist and Senior Lecturer in Oral Medicine and Pathology, School of Dentistry, University of Queensland, Brisbane
The new Therapeutic Guidelines: Oral and Dental is a long overdue but very welcome addition to the family of pocket-sized user-friendly reference guides to therapeutics. This first edition is a collaborative effort between the Therapeutic Guidelines Limited and the Australian Dental Association.
'Oral and Dental' aims to assist the general dental practitioner in their day-to-day practice and provides sound advice in situations where a prescription may be required. In an age of polypharmacy, the dentist is continuously challenged with patients taking multiple therapeutic preparations. The chapters on 'Dental management of patients taking medications' and 'Medical emergencies' are succinct and will prove very useful in daily dental practice.
This book is well laid out, although it would perhaps have been better to move chapters on 'Antibiotic prophylaxis' and 'Acute odontogenic infections' further up the contents table, and move chapters on 'Halitosis' and 'Oral mucosal disease' further down. In addition, the chapters on 'Getting to know your drugs' and 'Dental management of patients taking medications' could have been further subdivided in the table of contents for ease of reference, due to their length. Nonetheless, the extensive use of tables throughout the book compensates for this.
Therapeutic Guidelines: Oral and Dental is a single reference that brings together information usually obtained from multiple sources, and is packed with useful data based on clinical evidence, which will see it become an integral part of the armamentarium of every practising dentist. It is also a very valuable learning guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate dental students, and other practitioners who deal with oral disease. This guide comes with my strongest recommendation as a useful resource for all practitioners involved in the assessment and management of dental and oral disease.
