Exploring Dentists’ Personal Knowledge in Practice in the Delivery of Mandibular Anesthesia: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Local anesthesia, an essential component of dentistry, eliminates the pain associated with invasive surgical treatment. Despite an adequate understanding of theory, students often struggle to consistently achieve mandibular anesthesia in clinic. Objectives: The aim of this study is to explore the personal knowledge and experiences that inform dentists’ delivery of mandibular anesthesia in practice. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 dentists using the Zoom teleconferencing application and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Three themes were developed: 1) Practice makes proficient, 2) Mandibular anesthesia delivery is a dynamic process, not a single injection, and 3) Mandibular anesthesia delivery is patient-tailored and responsive. Conclusion: Mandibular anesthesia delivery is a dynamic process that requires both technical and non-technical competencies. Significance: Collectively, our findings suggest students would benefit from receiving more and diverse clinical instruction and practice, combined with a systematic framework of evaluation for clinical troubleshooting and technique development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".