Prospect of Oral Medicine and the Pedagogical Deficiencies

Oral medicine is principally considered as medical specialty but ended up in dentistry and now suffers an “Identity crisis”, bestriding both dentistry and medicine. We discuss the toil faced by the subject and the specialists in India and Internationally in the curriculum, at awareness level and the perseverance to change the consequence. Automated searches of Medline, Pubmed and the Cochrane Library were conducted for data collection; additional searches of main oral medicine journals were done manually using the keywords Growth and future of Oral medicine, Trends in oral disease, awareness of Common Oral Diseases, career preferences in dentistry, referral pattern to an oral medicine unit and survey of oral medicine practice. Several recent reviews have discussed the nature and extent of training the Oral Medicine specialists currently receive and the need for further enhancement of dental curriculum. Despite these apprehensions, we are quite passionate about the future. This enthusiasm is balanced by the realization that some impairments lie in our path. These collective signals are a clear wake-up call for our discipline.