Year Three

A course on medical emergencies in the dental office is divided into four sections:

• Basic Cardiac Life Support for Health Care Providers is given at the beginning of the third year. This course follows the standards established by the American Heart Association. You develop key skills and become certified by written evaluation and performing the psychomotor skills of one person, two persons, infant, child, and adult CPR as well as assessing and treating partial and/or complete airway obstruction. In addition the student will learn to use an automated external defibrillator.
• Medical Emergencies: Prevention and Protocols is given at the beginning of the third year in a lecture format. In this class, you review how to take a medical history and use it to examine the patient and establish a risk assessment. The most common medical emergency signs and symptoms are presented. The cleass reviews treatment protocols for emergencies.
• Emergency Scenarios: In this section, you participate in small discussion groups to go over different medical emergency scenarios and their treatment. You will be exposed to the most common medical emergencies, preparing you to respond effectively.
• Emergency Drills: During each oral surgery clinic rotation, the most common medical emergencies are played out and you and fellow students act as providers as well as patients undergoing an emergency.

The Pediatric and Special Health Care Needs Rotation introduces you to the specialty of pediatric dentistry and offers an opportunity to observe and discuss treatment for pediatric patients with special health care needs. You are assigned for one week to the Haven Pediatric Dental Clinic (722 West 168th Street) and spend approximately ten hours observing treatment provided to the clinic’s pediatric and special needs population. You discuss patient medical histories, dental histories, treatment plans, and behavior management techniques with pediatric dental residents and faculty. You also receive training in the use of nitrous oxide, have the opportunity to observe its administration, and discuss the rationale for its use as an anxiolytic.

This course introduces you to the basic principles guiding successful diagnosis and treatment planning for the needs of patients encountered in practice. The course familiarizes you with the fundamental guidelines to properly plan, sequence, and offer dental care. Each class incorporates a case to reinforce the specific principles learned that day. Students apply what they have learned to cases they see in the third year clinic and present these cases to the class.

Dentists can play an important role in combating tobacco-related illness; through this short course you develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to help patients become tobacco free. It is well known that tobacco use causes lung cancer, pulmonary disease, and other serious conditions but the deleterious effects of tobacco on oral health receive less emphasis. Because tobacco byproducts enter through the oral cavity, the first signs of ill health from tobacco use will most likely occur there. This course helps you take advantage of your unique position to support your patients’ cessation of tobacco and other substance abuse.

This course examines the delivery of dental care and the structure of dental practice within the context of social, economic, technological, and demographic trends and gives a big-picture view of the distribution of oral diseases that dental professionals treat and prevent. You and your classmates learn and become competent in conducting population-based needs assessment; population-based approaches to screening and risk assessment; patient-clinician interaction as it relates to issues of cultural competency and health literacy; issues involving patient access to, and utilization of, oral health care services; dental workforce issues; the nature and extent of oral health disparities; and the influence and role of evidence-based dentistry. You develop an understanding of the roles the government and private insurance industry play in restructuring approaches to dental practice. The class emphasizes structure of practice settings, regulation of health care, quality of care, dental benefits, and managed care plans. By acquiring, synthesizing, and organizing information on these current trends and organized dentistry's response to them, you will be better prepared to critically assess the processes that shape health care as a whole and dentistry in particular.

Trained facilitators from the New York Academy of Dentistry lead small seminars to introduce dental ethics through scenarios underscoring key issues. These facilitators guide discussion on the various dilemmas confronting today’s professional. Follow-up seminars are offered in the fourth year in the Senior Interdisciplinary Series.

This lecture-based course introduces you to clinical practice at the College of Dental Medicine. Lectures include: Environmental Health and Safety, Introduction to the Clinic, Treatment Planning, Infection Control, CPR, Medical Emergencies, Local Anesthesia, Chart and prescription writing, Esthetic Dentistry, Endodontics, Periodontics, Prosthodontics, Billing Compliance, and Chart Room Procedures.

As you offer clinical care to the pediatric patient, you are developing the knowledge and clinical skills necessary for comprehensive clinical care in every student-child patient interaction. You apply your knowledge by taking the health history, making an oral diagnosis (clinical and radiographic), planning treatment, disease management, infection control, behavior management, record keeping, referral guidelines, and review of related evidence-based literature. This training expands your ability to recognize, diagnose, and either appropriately manage or refer abnormalities in the developing dentition as dictated by the complexity of the problem as well as your own training, knowledge, and experience.

Through your clinical experience in the third and fourth year, we emphasize clinical management of simple and more complex periodontal cases, including the performance of simple periodontal surgical procedures. To advance your knowledge, you will observe and assist postdoctoral periodontics students in surgical and other procedures.

During this third year course, students apply the fundamental principles and skills of operative dentistry to provide treatment for their patients in a comprehensive care setting. These skills include the diagnosis of carious and non-carious lesions as well as the treatment planning of preventive and restorative care to achieve proper form, function, and health. Students use an evidence-based approach to choose appropriate restorative materials and perform both direct and indirect restoration of teeth using traditional and CAD/CAM approaches.

This course is a detailed, lecture-based introduction to the governing theories, scientific, biologic, and clinical principles, as well as the diagnostic and treatment modalities currently available for managing the esthetic aspects of dentistry. When possible, the course uses an evidence-based and best current practices approach to the presented material. To help you understand its importance to other disciplines and dental specialties, the instructor integrates the material with the preclinical and clinical teaching of other faculty members.

This course covers basic oral and maxillofacial surgical services starting with introductory lectures in areas involving the full scope of oral and maxillofacial surgery. Instruction includes clinical experience in delivering ambulatory oral and maxillofacial surgery services.

The curriculum consists of 16 online modules, comprised of PowerPoint presentations with audio lectures. A picture-based multiple choice quiz follows each module. Once you and your classmates learn the basic facts online and have completed your self-assessment, you gather for conferences where you are asked to formulate differential diagnoses based on clinical presentation, discuss diagnostic methods, make the final diagnosis, and select the most appropriate treatment.

This is a discussion-based, small group course that builds on the foundational knowledge learned in the orthodontic laboratory course, offering a more detailed understanding of important topics in orthodontics. You and your classmates work in seminar groups of 13 to 14 students and meet with a group leader for three sessions. Each of you is assigned an orthodontic topic to present on orally. Group leaders supplement each presentation with comments and moderate the following discussion.

Through both lectures and seminars, this course focuses on diagnosis and treatment planning for the primary and mixed dentition. The course emphasizes consideration of the child from psychological, medical, and oral health perspectives. Through the course, you learn appropriate preventive measures, patient management, care of trauma, adhesive restorative techniques, space maintenance, and interceptive and preventive orthodontic procedures for children and adolescents. Beginning in April, the course enters a weekly clinical phase. It concentrates on the application of the preceding principles. Lecture hours: 24 conference/review hours.

Your clinical experience in the third and fourth years emphasizes the management of simple and more complex periodontal cases, including the performance of simple periodontal surgical procedures. Through your clerkship, you observe and assist postdoctoral periodontics students in surgical and other procedures. This course exposes you to the advanced management of periodontal diseases and conditions. As a third year student, you spend a week in the postdoctoral periodontics program attending seminars and participating in periodontal procedures.

The Oral Pathology & Medicine course is designed to help third-year students to acquire fundamental knowledge of basic disease processes involving the oral mucosa and the jaw and management of those oral lesions. The learning objectives are as follows:

• Classify oral pathology entities according to clinical and/or radiographic appearance
• Formulate differential diagnosis
• Select diagnostic method to arrive at a definitive diagnosis
• Integrate knowledge of pathophysiology with oral surgical diagnosis and treatment
• Understand the importance of making diagnostic and surgical decisions based on sound basic science principles
• Learn the principles and techniques of surgical therapy
• Develop the ability to determine which procedure the practitioner may perform in the office and which procedure requires referral to a specialist

The curriculum is comprised of 16 online modules, comprised of PowerPoint lectures with audio. A picture-based multiple choice quiz follows each module. Once you and your classmates learn the basic facts online and have completed your self-assessment, you gather for conferences where you are asked to formulate differential diagnosis based on the clinical presentation. You discuss diagnostic methods, make the final diagnosis, and select the most appropriate treatment.

This 12-hour didactic instruction introduces you to pain and anxiety identification and management, with a particular emphasis on temporomandibular joint disorders. At the end of this course, you have the knowledge necessary to appropriately identify and minimize patient fear and anxiety, as well as understand the application of available management techniques. You also learn to identify when referral is indicated.

Clinical Practice of Oral Radiology is comprised of two rotations in the Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology Clinic, each lasting approximately five days. Building on what you have learned through Oral Radiology 1 and 2 plus summer training in radiographic technique, you now take intra-and extra-oral radiographs and write reports on the radiographs taken. Through the course, you attend additional seminars on differential diagnoses of radiographs as well as demonstrations of selected extra-oral radiographic techniques.