Attitudes of dentists and physicians toward the use of dietary fluoride supplements.

One of the major goals of the reported research was to determine how consistent health practitioners' knowledge, attitudes and practices are with the consensus of the public health and research communities regarding caries prevention. Both professions are aware of current caries preventive methods, but have very mixed reactions toward their relative effectiveness in the United States, today. Dentists and physicians see a great deal of value in community water fluoridation and see some effectiveness from fluoridating school water supplies. They regard the prescription of dietary fluoride supplements as an effective caries prevention measure, but to a much lesser extent, and base their use of these prescriptions on the age of the child and the level of fluoride in the community's water system. Topical fluoride applications and fluoride dentifrices, as well, are thought to be very effective preventive measures by only a small proportion of dentists and physicians, as are fluoride mouth rinses. Dentists and physicians rate systemic fluorides as effective more often than they do other selected methods, as would the research community; but they are not as solidly behind these, as evidence would suggest they should be. Both community water fluoridation and dietary fluoride supplements are known to be very effective caries prevention measures, yet only 66 percent of the physicians think community water fluoridation is very effective and only 37 percent think dietary fluoride supplements are very effective.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)