Letter to the Editor: Response to “On the Pediatric Oral Health Therapist: Lessons from Canada”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is odd that Drs. Quiñonez and Locker suggest that Canada, in addition to the United States, “require new forms of dental care delivery . . .” when the old Canadian dental therapist model was highly successful until degraded by the Canadian dental profession and conservative governments. For example, “By the mid-80's, the Saskatchewan Dental Plan employed over 150 school dental therapists. Over 90% of children were enrolled and over 90% of all enrolled children were examined and treated on a yearly basis.”(1) It would seem, then, that what Canada needs is to restore its school dental service staffed by dental therapists, not to reinvent the wheel, if it is to “responsibly act on the health needs of their most vulnerable citizens.” And that, perhaps, is the most important lesson that public health dentistry in the United States can learn from the Canadian Experience. Instead, Quiñonez and Locker recommend that “policy stakeholders should promote the pediatric oral health therapist in a non-partisan way, meaning that efforts should be ensured to gain support from all members of the political spectrum.” Indeed, all partisans are welcome, including the American and Canadian Dental Associations and their subsidiaries. But do they really think the ADA will voluntarily support pediatric oral health therapists? Given our limited resources for advocacy, time and money should not be spent courting the ADA, although the ADA should be encouraged to embrace care for all children by supporting dental and pediatric oral health therapists in school-based programs and community health centers. We should also bear in mind the lesson learned in Alaska where a combination of public health dentists, government agencies, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium representing the Native American population, and philanthropic organizations combined to initiate and defend the Alaska Dental Health Aide Therapist program. We need partisans in health care for all neglected populations to form coalitions and consortiums of people, organizations and governmental agencies to overcome traditional opposition and adopt remedies of proven worth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".