All professionals, who accept the responsibility to provide treatments which meet current standards of care, must expand and reinforce the knowledge and skills gained during his / hers undergraduate training by following the development within their discipline. This has for long been accepted by all parties involved; be it governmental or nongovernmental research and educational institutions, professional organizations, or publicly or privately organized oral health care units. The weights attached to the classical means to update professional performances have varied, but the suggested possibilities have usually been very similar; i.e. a mixture of recommended scientific literature (journals and textbooks), structured continuing educational courses and in house training.

However, what is needed in terms of prudent practice does not equal to keep abreast with the steadily increasing flow of research data; which in terms of scientific advances has been held to surpass even the most up-to-date educational training provided only 5 years earlier. This fact is not always appreciated, and many educational approaches are thus overloaded with new findings out of laboratories and experimental settings, which are way away from clinical phase three trials, and which moreover often remain isolated and / or incomprehensible because the ground connecting them with the reader's past basic training has not been given due attention. The same dilemma commonly belittles the otherwise well intended general advice to meet what is needed by studying some set number of accredited scientific journals on a regular basis.

It is with a focus on the above perspectives that we have approached, and are at work with ..

• ORACODENT, an information resource which
• as an electronic chair-side utility is intended to appear as an easily accessible and integrated learning tool alongside such other bread-and-butter computer supported facilities which take care of supply databases, email for patient contact and referrals, calendars, registrations from digitally operated diagnostic tools and patient records; and
• as a knowledgebase should make relevant clinical facts and figures available at your fingertips; be it as a reflection of the distilled knowledge of generations or an offering of contemporary research findings.

 
• The encyclopedic type documents of ORACODENT, which have a focus on oral pathology and oral medicine,
• contain concise descriptions of more than 1000 disorders in which there are
• easily identified recurrent headings
• synonyms of disease names,
• short definitions,
• explanations of uncommon names,
• personal data behind eponyms,
• an emerging imagebase; today of more than 1000 images
• extensive numbers of internal (today some 14000) and external (today some 1000) cross-references / links
• include short overviews of some basic biological / medical concepts,
• give on-hand descriptions on how to handle emergency situations in the dental clinic
• give short overviews on systemic disorders of importance to patient management in the dental office.

 
• The origin of the content of ORACODENT is - and will continuously be - a reflection of
• personal clinical and laboratory experiences,
• Medline searches to focus original research communications published in scientific journals, and
• readings across a broad range of basic textbooks in pathology, medicine and pharmacology, as well as across course material recommended in undergraduate dental programmes.

 
• The format of ORACODENT has been closely tailored
• to relate its content to international classifications, as e.g. the WHO ICD-10, ICD10 - DA3 Application of the International Classification of Diseases to Dentistry and Stomatology and the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical  (ATC) Classification for drugs; and
• to take advantage of modern, easy-to-handle information technology with which the basic content can be approached on either a stand-alone PCs, over intranets or over the Internet.

Searching the content is supported by
• browsing, which - through the extensive use of links - conserves and augments the classical approach to content found in textbooks, and by
• full-text and title indexing techniques which - as supported by effective search engines - allow user and / or situation specific approaches.

 
• The intended primary audiences for ORACODENT are
• general practitioners in the dental team
• specialists in hospital dentistry and / or oral medicine; and
• students of dentistry and allied sciences, who should find ORACODENT a valuable, supplementary reading to recommended textbooks.

 
• Users of ORACODENT connected to the Internet can benefit from
• the continuously updated web version of ORACODENT; and
• document related references for Further Reading which - through attached links to Medline abstracts - rapidly expand the basis for both generalized and specialist data.

".. You touch on my sore spot. WE ALL LOVE REVIEWS but we get no thanks or credit if we write them, and often get abuse since it is believed that "anyone can do them"! The IF shows how very much they are used .. Such is the hypocrisy of academia! "

".. a barrage of misused terms are found. A "mixed tumor" which is not mixed and a reparative granuloma which does not repair anything, fortunately these two are now almost extinct but still many other remain. Pyogenic granuloma without pus, osteitis without inflammation or osteitis instead of osteomyelitis. Is the term granuloma always correct? A cyst for us must have epithelium when by classical definition it does not need to. Is a mucocele a cyst? and now do all DG desquamate?  - But on second thoughts I think that an official academy for oral pathology / medicine terms will end up in the same way as the construction of the Babel tower, which according to the Book of Genesis was interrupted by the confusion of tongues ".

"I am asking for information, personal experiences or literature reference, regarding patients who are otherwise well but for years have had multiple, recurrent pyogenic granulomas. I have considered gingival enlargement in ligneous conjunctivitis but the patient has no eye lesions. Thanks"

".. No doubt the next generation will learn from digital texts and pictures on their laptops, but these books will be a pleasure to read for a long time yet."