Dentistry in Japan Should Become a Specialty of Medicine with Dentists Educated as Oral Physicians

Abstract

In Japan, the population of elderly individuals (those sixty-five years of age and older) will increase to over 30 percent of the total population by 2030. The elderly commonly have chronic diseases that result in individuals being biologically and pharmacologically compromised. Dentists must have a reliable knowledge of basic clinical medicine for these individuals to be safely and effectively treated. The isolation of dental education from medical education may have been advantageous in the past for the development of dentistry as a profession; however, changes in people's life expectancy and lifestyles, as well as rapid advances in the biomedical sciences, require dentists to have a thorough foundation in biomedical science and clinical medicine not dissimilar from a physician in any other field of medicine. A reformation of dental education is necessary if optimum oral health care is to be provided for patients in the future. It is thus advocated that dentistry should become one specialty of medicine known as oral medicine, and we propose that the education of dentists should be modified to produce oral physicians.