March 23, 2001
Symposium on dentistry’s future set for May 24, 25
The University of Washington’s fourth Distinguished Professor in Dentistry Symposium, “Dentistry’s Future: Broadening the Impact on Patient Health and Dental Practice,” will be held Thursday and Friday, May 24 and 25, at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle.
Support for the symposium, which features a panel of internationally recognized speakers, comes from an endowment created by funds from the Washington State Legislature in 1985 and matched by the Washington Dental Service Foundation. The primary responsibility of the Distinguished Professor is to plan and conduct a triennial symposium on state-of-the-art issues facing dentistry.
The fourth symposium is being planned by Dr. Samuel Dworkin, who was appointed the Distinguished Professor for 1998-2001. In planning the symposium, Dworkin was assisted by an advisory committee of representatives from the University of Washington, the Washington Dental Service Foundation and the practicing dental community.
The symposium will explore how the explosion in new scientific knowledge and burgeoning technology provides an opportunity for the clinical dentist to have an ever-expanding impact on the long-term health, well-being and quality of life of all dental patients. As its major focus, the symposium will call attention to domains of health and disease for which clinical dentistry is assuming an increasingly central role for diagnosis, assessment and clinical management.
Some of the many topics to be discussed: applying the revolution in biomedical assessment to dentistry; cutting-edge understanding of chronic pain and improved management of chronic orofacial pain; tissue engineering and biomimetics to create new biologic structures; alternative approaches to safe and comfortable management of child and adult dental patients; and quality of life and practice issues facing the dentist of the future.
Dworkin, who joined the faculty in 1974, currently heads the Orofacial Pain Research Group in the Department of Oral Medicine. He is a pioneer in biobehavioral research on acute and chronic pain. Dworkin began his clinical, research and educational career with a focus on dental pain and anxiety. He then went on to head the first major population- based study in the United States on temporomandibular disorders (TMD), which is the most prevalent chronic orofacial pain condition world-wide. He also led the way in developing an internationally used diagnostic system that integrates both biologic and psychosocial assessment into the diagnosis of TMD. This classification system has been translated into 10 foreign languages and has been held out as a model system applicable to diagnosis of all chronic pain conditions.
Dworkin is a charter member of the International Association for the Study of Pain and the American Pain Society and a member of other associations including the American Dental Association, American Association of Dental Schools and International Association for Dental Research.
For further information or a brochure on the Washington Dental Service Distinguished Professor in Dentistry Symposium, please contact the Office of Continuing Dental Education, Box 357137, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, or call 206-543-5448.
