Therapeutic Awareness Trends of Dentistry among Public in Tamil Nadu: A web engine search based study

Abstract

Brief Background - The awareness of the dental ailments and its treatment modalities was initially assessed by means of questionnaire based epidemiological surveys. However, the advancement in technology will not only be used by the public to know about the importance of various dental ailments but also their treatment. On the other hand, the technology also utilizes to find out the awareness of the same among public. Google trends is a web engine based tool, provided by google. It allows the public to identify the popularity of a particular search term. Using this particular tool, we could identify the search trend of various dental terms pertaining to disease and treatment digitally. To evaluate the awareness of dental ailments and its treatments in Tamilnadu in 2020 and to compare the same, with that of previous decade to analyze the change in awareness over time. Material and Methods - Google is the most commonly used by the general public worldwide. Hence we used Google search Engine to know the awareness of dental ailments and the treatment modalities among the general public. Five keywords were selected for each dental specialty. All the key words were run through google trends web engine. Results - On the whole significantly highest searched terminology in Tamilnadu for the year of 2020 was extraction with 67 searches. Following this dental braces were the next commonly searched term with the count of 44. The significantly searched term for the year of 2010 was removable denture with 64 searches. The next commonly searched term was impaction with 56 searches and dental floss with 55 searches. Conclusion - The current study is a novel attempt and paves a new platform to evaluate the awareness of disease, its trend and its treatment in dentistry and various other specialties. Key Words - Dental disease, Dental therapy, Google trends, Oral health awareness, Web awareness