Talk:Dental disease

I do not know if this is the best name for the article. I think a better article would be oral and maxillofacial disease of oral and maxillofacial pathology (I realize it is currently a redirect to an associated topic) so that it is inclusive of all diseases usually treated or identified by dentists. There is even a specialty on oral and maxillofacial pathology. If we were to really be strict on definitions, "dental" disease would be diseases affecting teeth, which would mean "gum" disease is not included as there is nothing wrong with teeth in that case. - Dozenist talk 03:42, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What is this page doing?

This article is in a bad state...

Firstly, what is it actually trying to cover?

This is semantics, but do we mean dental as in pertaining to the teeth, or dental as in dealt with by dentistry as a specialty? I would tend to think the former since we are an encyclopedia.I started to remove some mention that tongue diseases are also included in "dental disease". We have the article oral and maxillofacial pathology which is in a better state. Given the state of this article, perhaps we should merge the content to there? Lesion (talk) 01:31, 28 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree this is a poor article and was worse when I read it a few days back. I agree it should be limited to dental disease and only included the "Other conditions" links because many were implied by the lead. There is a confusion in that Gum disease (disambiguation) redirects here, whereas Gum disease redirects to Periodontal disease but Gum Disease to Periodontitis. On the other hand Tooth decay redirects to Dental caries whilst Toothache has its own article. Clearly a number of these articles overlap and what is important is that the normal person with a tooth problem can get to information at the level they want easily. In the UK at least, oral and maxillofacial conditions are a speciality whereas the foregoing are dealt with by the normal dental surgeries. Probably in the US there is more speciality, I don't know.

Perhaps this page would best be a proper disambiguation page and the confusion of redirects noted above sorted out. However, it seems to correspond better to the notion of a WP:BROADCONCEPT article. If this is the case, it needs to be improved. Chris55 (talk) 10:21, 29 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please see my latest comment on talk:Oral and maxillofacial pathology. Suggest we should try to keep discussion in one place. Lesion (talk) 14:45, 29 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

By making the scope of this article into non-tooth and gum related conditions (like burning mouth syndrome, oral cancer (although rarely oral cancer can originate from the gums), temporomandibular joint disorder, dry mouth, etc.) it is not just overlap with oral and maxillofacial pathology, it is duplication of scope. This is not organized, we should cover the topic in one place. Lesion (talk) 01:01, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not at all: they are merely referred to as related conditions - some of which are dealt with by the normal dental practitioner. I'd be quite happy for them to be put under "See also" if you prefer. I think your idea of "scope" is not well-defined and there are endless real overlaps in Wikipedia, quite apart from the conceptual overlap that is merely in your own mind. Your oral and maxillofacial pathology article does not cover any of the four main headings of this article. You've been working on that for a year - has it only just occurred to you before that some rather common topics were missing? Chris55 (talk) 14:13, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]