Education
Medicine has accompanied the human race since the dawn of time, and like knowledge it is embedded in the existence of each human being. Knowledge carries broad connotations, and is most often associated with wisdom, literacy, erudition, or level of education. Meanwhile, it can also be perceived as skills, qualifications, or experience. This divides knowledge to its theoretical and practical aspects, first defined by Aristotle.
Hence, knowledge is founded on both learning and experience, where education is the matrix of both. Education by empirical experience enables not only learning new substance, but also discovering own talents, surgical sense, intuition, or creativeness. The key lies in learning the practice under the direction of mentors, experienced clinicists.
Medicine, as no other discipline, merges theory and practice into a tangibly captured value which makes up the competencies. These are particularly important in interventional medicine where treating patients consists in operating on them, i.e. intruding physically into the human organism. No Wonder that for every medical doctor the process of continuous improvement of own qualifications constitutes the natural path of development, self-fulfilment, and achieving professional satisfaction.
The history of medicine is marked with diagnostic and therapeutic errors. Nevertheless, education is about something much broader than merely compliance with the prime rule of professional ethics, Primum non nocere, as this is obvious. The aim of education is to gain knowledge and procedural skills, and work out optimal canons of conduct so as to know how to treat patients in the best possible way at the given stage of scientific development, be able to eliminate any pathological conditions in them, restore their health and functionality; in the case of dentists this also includes restoring their beauty.
Dental medicine is continually evolving and reflects the scientific and technological progress which, as never before, is connected with a growing demand for beautiful and healthy denture. The latter comes as a true impulse stimulating to learn new possibilities developed by the contemporary medicine. New process technologies are based on employing human cells and tissues, as well as biomaterials, natural polymers such as collagen, chitosan, or hyaluronic acid, and synthetic polymers. Titanium alloys have become common, not only in dental medicine. The rules of physics and biomechanics are ever more frequently used in surgical techniques. The development of dental restoration techniques is oriented on digitalisation, virtual treatment planning, the CAD-CAM technology, templates, and advanced radiological diagnostics. Similar progress has become predominant in the dental laboratory area where new technologies changes the options of employing prosthetic restorations of the so far unattainable quality parameters.
Education offers a chance of learning those and many other novelties on an on-going basis so as to broaden the perspectives of treatment and incorporate them in the range of one’s own competencies. Education is our guide and pillar, and at the same time a perspective for the path of professional development.
Our desire is for our blog to present the broadly construed knowledge useful for dental practitioners. Therefore, we will review all kinds of innovations connected primarily with new product and process technologies, and treatment methodologies. These will be intertwined with information on new forms of teaching, the forms and methods employed in education, and the methodology of sharing knowledge, as well as new educational goals adequate for the initiated surgical solutions. We will present the profiles of the leading lecturers. The articles will also tackle on legal aspects, and interesting facts of the world of science and technology. We hope our blog will become a site integrating the circle of dental practitioners and a valuable source of information. Enjoy reading.
Jarosław Szycik
