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Book Review: Paediatric Dentistry

This soft back manual published by Oxford University Press is the second edition of the successful text of first published in 1997. The format remains similar to that used in the first edition, but with a greater use of colour making the text easier to read. There are 422 pages in 17 chapters written by 16 well-known clinicians and academics. With the exception of one new chapter, ‘The treatment of dental caries in the preschool child’ the sections and contributors remain the same with minor updates in most areas. The multi-authored approach works well in this text, allowing individual contributors to share their expertise, while ensuring that the style remains consistent throughout the text. The text gives good coverage of many areas of paediatric dentistry with numerous figures and colour clinical photographs. It is refreshing to see the latter used to illustrate many operative procedures, instead of the line diagrams that so frequently appear in textbooks. The ‘Key points’, a useful feature in the original edition, appear in colour boxes making them easier to identify. The index is thorough making it easy to locate specific points within the text. The strength of this text is that it gives good coverage of paediatric dentistry in its widest sense with growth and development, behaviour management, examination and treatment planning, local anaesthesia, dental caries, operative dentistry, endodontics, periodontal disease, trauma, advanced restorative techniques, dental anomalies, soft tissue pathology, oral surgery, medically compromised care, childhood disability, and the orthodontic-paediatric interface all given good coverage. For both undergraduates and practitioners this means that the answers to many questions can be located within one text. Clearly, detailed investigation of specific points cannot be covered in such a text, but additional reading and references are provided at the end of each chapter to assist the reader. The text follows a logical sequence and while some topics are touched on in more than one chapter (for example, fissure sealants are included in the chapters on dental caries and operative treatment) the discussions are complementary not repetitive. The chapter on paediatric endodontics covers both primary molars and traumatized incisors, and I can see why this has been done. However, undergraduates often confuse the medicaments for the primary and permanent dentition and I wonder if the endodontic treatment of the traumatized incisor would be better placed in the chapter on traumatic dental injuries to decrease the risk. Overall, this is an excellent text for anyone who treats children and it should be on your bookshelves. For those who possess the first edition there may not be sufficient new material to update at this stage. For everybody else I would thoroughly recommend it.