An instructor told me to just give the patient antibiotics and painkillers and to come back. And they weren’t even swollen. I know you’re not supposed to give antibiotics to people unless they have swelling and you can actually see something. When prompted to talk about EBD, the second year student participants felt disgruntled about how the concept was taught. One second year student noted the feeling in the room, “you heard the collective exasperation from everybody when you brought up evidence-based dentistry.” They felt this way because of the way EBD was evaluated more so than because of how it was taught to them. Second year students described losing points on assignments for putting a comma in the wrong place or using different words in the PubMed search. They felt these deductions were offensive, trivial, and unrelated to the true overall concept and application of EBD. A second year student described his frustration with how EBD was taught: I think there’s a lot of frustration for a lot of different reasons, with how evidence-based dentistry has been taught to us in school, and it’s almost been bastardized into this thing that, you know, we don’t even understand what the idea of evidence-based dentistry is. But the way either it’s presented to us, or the way we’re interpreting it no matter – – who’s fault it is, whether it’s ours’ or the faculty’s, or whatever the curriculum itself – – it’s thought of as really unimportant, really frustrating… Participants in each focus group called evidence based dentistry a useful and saw “tool” the relevance and importance of learning how to assess and use evidence in daily practice. A fourth year student said he uses EBD to explain why to do something: If the patient asks you why, or if a student asks you why, you have to be able to explain. And if you don’t know, then you have to look it up. Although not necessarily evidence-based, students still appreciated the knowledge that only came from investing time in a career in dentistry. One of the things that made a professor’s experience seem more valid to the students than EBD was the realization that experienced dentists had a 360 degree view of patient care that evolved from years of trying different treatments under realistic conditions. A second year participant explained:
An instructor told me to just give the patient antibiotics and painkillers and to come back. And they weren’t even swollen. I know you’re not supposed to give antibiotics to people unless they have swelling and you can actually see something. When prompted to talk about EBD, the second year student participants felt disgruntled about how the concept was taught. One second year student noted the feeling in the room, “you heard the collective exasperation from everybody when you brought up evidence-based dentistry.” They felt this way because of the way EBD was evaluated more so than because of how it was taught to them. Second year students described losing points on assignments for putting a comma in the wrong place or using different words in the PubMed search. They felt these deductions were offensive, trivial, and unrelated to the true overall concept and application of EBD. A second year student described his frustration with how EBD was taught: I think there’s a lot of frustration for a lot of different reasons, with how evidence-based dentistry has been taught to us in school, and it’s almost been bastardized into this thing that, you know, we don’t even understand what the idea of evidence-based dentistry is. But the way – either it’s presented to us, or the way we’re interpreting it – no matter who’s fault it is, whether it’s ours’ or the faculty’s, or whatever – the curriculum itself – it’s thought of as really unimportant, really frustrating… Participants in each focus group called evidence based dentistry a useful “tool” and saw the relevance and importance of learning how to assess and use evidence in daily practice. A fourth year student said he uses EBD to explain why to do something: If the patient asks you why, or if a student asks you why, you have to be able to explain. And if you don’t know, then you have to look it up. Although not necessarily evidence-based, students still appreciated the knowledge that only came from investing time in a career in dentistry. One of the things that made a professor’s experience seem more valid to the students than EBD was the realization that experienced dentists had a 360 degree view of patient care that evolved from years of trying different treatments under realistic conditions. A second year participant explained:
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