Читать книгу Dermal Fillers for Dental Professionals - Arun K Garg - Страница 6

Preface

This book presents a clinical experience–based framework for the incorporation of dermal fillers for facial rejuvenation procedures into a general dental practice or dental specialty practice. These procedures are a natural progression in the evolution of cosmetic dentistry. The dentist’s and dental specialist’s existing skill set of esthetic assessment, administration of local anesthesia, and making patients comfortable in the office setting make this type of treatment fairly easy to incorporate into the practice routine.

Today, providing dermal filler and/or cosmetic neurotoxin injections is permitted by an overwhelming majority of the state dental licensing boards in the United States and abroad. What’s more, the American Dental Association and state associations have been sponsoring courses that train dentists in these procedures for many years. And why not? Under U.S. medical licensing guidelines, any physician with a medical degree from an accredited institution—regardless of specialty—can offer cosmetic facial injections as a service to their patients with no additional training. Does anyone really believe that the average obstetrician or rheumatologist has greater expertise in facial anatomy than a dentist? What about estheticians? In some states, an individual with no medical education can take a weekend course and then give facial injections, provided they are under the “delegation” of a physician.

Dental training and skills make the group exceedingly well qualified to provide safe and esthetically pleasing dermal filler injections. Like most dental procedures, administering facial injections for cosmetic purposes requires a combination of excellent technical and artistic skills, as well as comprehensive understanding of head and neck anatomy and knowledge of current materials and treatment modalities.

We are certainly not suggesting that the average dentist or dental specialist does not require additional training to learn how to select an appropriate dermal filler product, practice safe facial injection techniques, or prevent complications. On the contrary, our goal in writing this book is to provide the information that the dental clinician needs—and none of the information that dentists, by virtue of their training, already possess—to become qualified providers in the highly rewarding (and potentially lucrative) area of facial rejuvenation.

The scope of dental and dental specialty practice has never been static. The purpose of this book is not to promote the need for all dentists and dental specialists to provide these cosmetic services. But rather the objective is to present how numerous dermal filler procedures can be successfully and safely incorporated into an existing practice using the model that we, as both practicing clinicians and academicians, have developed and taught to hundreds of others over many years.