Covid-19 crisis has done lot of damage both psychologically and mentally. It becomes difficult to visit any dentist or medical faculty because of exposure risk and death chances. But dental problems are independent of any natural calamity or pandemic. Best example is pain due to tooth ache. Sometimes it becomes totally intolerable. So, during this pandemic time, virtual or Tele-dentistry concept is emerging as a popular alternative to dental visits. At some time, it was considered as a wrong practice reason being without clinical check-up, it is not advisable to prescribe any treatment. Also, it is against the medical ethics. Though patient has the advantage of avoiding the visit but there are maximum chances of wrong medicines prescribed. So, these things do not allowed the virtual hospitals to prosper. But pandemic has caused lot of discomfort to people. It has also resulted in breakdown of dentistry. Guidelines have changed for both hospitals and Clinics. Need for social distancing has led to increase in capacity of the reception areas. It is making the expenses of clinics going at unbelievable costs. Definitely, Covid crisis is causing a normal clinic infrastructure to expand to almost double and triple which is causing increase in cost of land area. Hence, it became a reason for Tele-dentistry to take position of normal dentistry. There are various advantages of Tele-dentistry. First, it avoid visit of patient. Secondly, the dentists who are waiting in clinics can perform their duties on a virtual platform. Also, these patients can follow up to that dentist making a two-way beneficial process. But, even, in this virtual platform it is not so simple. Several precautions are required to perform virtual dentistry. These include proper medical and dental history, high resolution clinical photographs and above all authenticity from patient side because what is shown to doctor is expected to be highly accurate. Hence, I suggest every dentist to carry out Tele-dentistry during this Covid-19 crisis to provide both essential services and prosper their field.

References

Citation

Citation: Bharat Joshi. “Tele-Dentistry-Best Option during Covid-19 Crisis".Acta Scientific Dental Sciences 4.11 (2020): 01.

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Copyright: © 2020 Bharat Joshi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.