Book Reviews

Treatment Planning for the Developing Dentition. Helen Rodd & Alyson Wray. Quintessence Publishing Co. Ltd. ISBN 1-85097-081-5. Price £28 This publication is number 26 of 50 volumes which will eventually comprise the Quintessentials of Dental Practice series and which cover “basic principles and key issues in all aspects of modern dental medicine” in 9 principal topic sections. Although treatment planning is the cornerstone to appropriate and effective dental care for all ages, managing the developing child and its developing dentition can be a particular challenge. Treatment planning is an important key clinical skill but has relatively few pages devoted to it in many textbooks. Therefore a book which provides such a fully comprehensive approach to treatment planning for children is rare and most welcome. “Treatment Planning for the Developing Dentition” is the third book to be published in the Paediatric/Orthodontics section, the other two being Child Taming; How to Cope with Children in Dental Practice and Paediatric Cariology. The series is aimed at busy general dental practitioners and this book focuses on the key principles of comprehensive treatment planning and good decision-making to optimise elective and emergency dental care for children. The book is divided into 6 chapters, starting with the first visit and information gathering, followed by interceptive orthodontic treatment, planning for prevention, the restorative phase of treatment, management of the dental emergency and finishing with recall strategy. Good quality colour illustrations and extensive tables complement the text, although the format of some tables does not always suit the small portrait layout of the book. That the book manages to deliver such a comprehensive guide to good treatment planning for children is testament to the writing style adopted by the authors which makes the text easy to read and the chapter layouts with their stated aims and objectives are useful aids. The only criticism of this excellent publication is that the book tries to cover a little too much and there are some areas of overlap with the Paediatric Cariology volume of the series, particularly in relation to the preventive and restorative phases of treatment planning. While this is partly inevitable when delivering a series of books and is obviously preferable to areas of omission, there are some areas of the book where more in-depth coverage would have been useful. For example, in the chapter on interceptive orthodontics, treatment planning when involving teeth of poor prognosis in both the primary and permanent dentition can be an area of particular difficulty for the non-specialist. Identifying, responding to, and monitoring a child’s level of caries risk is an important skill which has to be used effectively when planning preventive and recall strategies. In Chapter 1, caries risk assessment factors are introduced under clinical, social and behavioural and developmental headings and explored through three sample treatment plans. An extension of this section with listings for high and low caries risk categories based on these factors, cross-referenced with Chapter 3 would have been useful especially as high and low caries risk categories are used extensively in the literature and often form the basis for targeting of preventive therapies (BSPD 1997). This is a very well-written book which general dental practitioners will find useful to have on their book shelves. It will also be a very useful text for undergraduates and postgraduates, although its relatively high cost may confine it to the reference section. Anne Maguire

Communicating in Dental Practice: Stress-Free Dentistry and Improving Patient care. R Freeman, G Humphris. Quintessence Publishing Co. Ltd. ISBN 1-85097-099-8. Price £28