Question about dental school

[SCDP]

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Why is there so much information thrown at you that seems to be useless in dental school?

I mean I of course am not in dental school but dentists I've talked to say they don't remember much from their classes and I feel like most information is in and out of heads of dental students after exams...

Why make it so tough and so much unnecessary info if you can be just as good of a dentist without it?

 

[SM555]

Because otherwise little Johnny down the street who just snorted 3 lines of sweet tarts and used his sisters cat as a piñata would be performing brain surgery at the age of 19.

 

[ModifiedBass]

There's a reason for the "doctor" in DMD/DDS. Plenty of people could probably drill teeth. The few you want to are the ones that can understand the pathology. In order to understand pathology, you need to understand physiology and so on and so forth. It's not unnecessary when knowing it could help diagnose a life-threatening pathology, something poorly trained dentists can fail to do.

 

[y3nd0]

Sometimes I wonder this myself. We have already proven we're not idiots who would snort 3 lines of sweet tarts when we went through 4 years of undergrad.
Some classes are completely understandable (oral micro, pathology, head and neck anatomy, etc.), but sometimes I am just sitting and looking at my computer screen, staring at a histo slide of some seminiferous tubules, thinking, "Really?"

 

[distressstudent]

The dean at MWU-AZ touched on this a bit. It's really just to past the boards; he knows his students wont retain the information.

And the reason we have boards is to reassure the public/whoever cares that dentists know what they are doing

 

[SCDP]

The dean at MWU-AZ touched on this a bit. It's really just to past the boards; he knows his students wont retain the information.

And the reason we have boards is to reassure the public/whoever cares that dentists know what they are doing

This is what I figured, just a way for a**es to be covered saying oh we taught our dentists this and they passed... that's why they have a license to we aren't liable for anything

 

[DentalDoge]

This is what I figured, just a way for a**es to be covered saying oh we taught our dentists this and they passed... that's why they have a license to we aren't liable for anything

It seems to me that NBDE is the way for you get your doctorate, regardless of which school you go to. It's a national standard to determine that you have the required knowledge and skills to be a dentist

That being said, just because you have license does not automatically make you a good dentist. Theres alot more about a school's curriculum and environment that cannot be tested.

 

[LabCoatAndPearls]

Because otherwise little Johnny down the street who just snorted 3 lines of sweet tarts and used his sisters cat as a piñata would be performing brain surgery at the age of 19.

Better a brain surgeon than a veterinarian...lol