GUEST EDITORIAL

Diego Machado Ardenghi
Dental Ethics Education: An Introduction to the Theme

Dear IDEALS Members,

It is with great pleasure that I introduce to you this special issue of the Bulletin of the International Dental Ethics and Law Society. In this issue, the Editorial Board of the IDEALS bulletin took a direction towards publishing articles related to how the field of dental ethics (which in some schools is combined with dental law) has been taught in different countries around the world. For this first thematic issue of the Bulletin, we invited instructors and professors of this discipline to describe how it is being taught in their dental schools. In addition, the issue includes a short article submitted by one of our IDEALS members that happened to be on dental ethics education and hence fits this issue perfectly. The issue concludes with a list of dental ethics textbooks currently in print.

This is a very relevant topic to the field of dental ethics and law, for as we want to graduate dentists that have moral and ethical values as one of the core components in their workplace, we need to understand how we are teaching ethics to students. Unfortunately this discipline may not be regarded as important as other technical disciplines in certain dental schools; dental students might not pay the appropriate necessary attention to the ethical field. Moreover, I personally think that the research field of ethics and law in the area of dental education needs to grow more and become more recognized in the academia. Thus this edition might help future researchers interested in these areas.

You may also notice that the IDEALS bulletin has a new feature. From now on we will create a Portable Document Format (Pdf) for the articles published in the Bulletin which you can download and print. We think that this is a great way to make readers able to access the articles even when they are offline, reading these articles on their computers, PDAs, or any other handheld device that are capable of reading Pdf files; we will still maintain the HTML format for reading the papers online.

We, the Editorial Board of the Bulletin, would like to deeply thank all the authors of the articles published here who took their precious time to bring this special issue. Moreover, we would like to open an invitation to any other instructors or professors of such disciplines from any other university who would also like to write a description of their dental ethics and law courses. We hope to follow this first issue with regular thematic issues on educational in dental law and ethics.  We specifically invite instructors of courses in the area of dental law to submit articles so that our next thematic can focus more on that discipline. We hope that these issues will become a great information resource for other dental schools to learn how dental ethics and law has been taught, and be a resource for all of us “dental ethicists” to learn how dental ethics and dental law should move forward towards a better future in favor of our patients and our profession. I hope you enjoy this issue of our bulletin.

Sincerely,

Diego Machado Ardenghi, D.D.S., M.A.
IDEALS Assistant-Secretary,
Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Dentistry
McGill University
Canada

Correspondence

Citation

Diego Machado Ardenghi, D.M. (2009). Dental Ethics Education: An Introduction to the The Theme Bulletin of the 
International Dental Ethics and Law Society 9(2), 1-2.