By Shannon Turgeon
A Pitt researcher was part of a group that wrote new dental pain management guidelines that are now being widely endorsed among dental professionals. The guidelines are meant to help manage acute pain while minimizing opioid use.
Deborah Polk, visiting associate professor of dental public health, School of Dental Medicine, and of behavioral and community health sciences, School of Public Health, along with dental researchers from the American Dental Association Science and Research Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, created evidence-based guidelines to help dentists choose appropriate options for pain management for patients dealing with toothaches and extractions.
“The panel looked at the existing literature and got information about patient preferences,” Polk said. “Based on that information, they were able to say, okay, here are our recommendations for how to manage this acute dental pain.”
The guidelines recommend that dentists steer away from opiates for short-term pain relief and instead start with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen. Now, these guidelines are being publicized via endorsements by national and international dental organizations.
In the dental medicine field, endorsements serve as a way to help disseminate information. When an organization endorses a new guideline, it encourages its members to begin practicing according to the guideline.
“As a professional, it tells me that my home association is saying this is the right thing to do. So it helps give a little bit of a nudge to encourage people to adopt a new behavior,” Polk explained.
So far, six organizations have endorsed the guidelines. The list of organizations is continually being updated here.
“It’s so exciting to me that [endorsements] give us a way to reach the people that we need to be reaching, in a way that is comfortable for them.... We're getting as close to them as we can to share this information,” she continued.
In addition to receiving endorsements from dental organizations, Polk and her colleagues are also working to share their guidelines with medical providers.
Many people with acute dental pain seek relief from hospital emergency departments. To ensure that their findings would also reach emergency medicine providers, Polk and her team revised the guidelines to apply to an emergency medicine setting and published them in an emergency medicine journal.
“This issue is not narrowly dental--it’s all-encompassing,” said Polk.
“The goal is to have anybody who would be in a position to manage acute dental pain, to be managing it in a way that is concordant with the guidelines,” she continued.
Polk and her colleagues are planning to write a paper describing what they have discovered about the endorsement process, while working to publicize their guidelines. They have found that all parties involved in the process need to work together in order for new information to have the greatest reach.
“We think it’s important for both people like guideline developers and professional organizations to recognize that they have a role to play,” she said.