DentaltownUK April 2017 - 11

Mike Gow

Editorial

email to a different email address that I
have:
"Hello,Am Mrs V*, i will like to do teeth
whitening for group of people for my event
that will commence in the upcoming weeks.
Do you accept credit card?"
They were suspiciously identical in every
way other than the name. Perhaps some of
you had a similar email?
I have also had two separate experiences
in the past of contact with people who have
purported to be professionals, who in fact
were not. If you've ever watched an episode
of 'Catfish' you will know just how easily it
can happen.
We readily accept friends request on
Facebook because some of our friends are
friends with the person. We trust that the
person is a dentist because they say they
are. Group admins grant people access to
'dentist only' forums, purely by assessing
their profile page to judge whether or not
they work in dentistry.
I think that we, as a profession must be
careful when it comes to sharing personal
and professional details in social media
groups.
How sure are we that the person we are
accepting as a friend on Facebook is actually
a dentist, or actually the person they say they
are? How sure are we that the people in the
'closed' or 'secret' forum we are members
of are in fact all dental professionals as the

group claims?
Social media is an easy and fast way to
communicate. Having groups allows us to
have conversations and interact with our
peers and I am involved in several myself.
In my opinion, you should only ever post
anything that you would be happy with
absolutely anyone and everyone seeing,
regardless of how 'closed' you think the
group is where it is posted.
One way of having more security is
to use a dedicated forum which has an
administrator and at least some way of
verifying users. There are a number of good
dental forums out there, however one which
has been underused by UK dentists up until
now is the Dentaltown forum.
To check out what Dentaltown has to
offer and to sign up for free visit
www.dentaltown.com. NB This is separate
to subscribing to this emagazine which you
can do at www.dentaltownuk.com
The Dentaltown forum was one of the
first dental forums and has a massive number
of dentists posting from around the world.
There are over 220,000 dentists registered,
with over 4.5 Million posts to date! There is
even a dentaltown app to make access even
easier. We have just launched specific UK
boards on the site for clinical discussion.
There will also discussion areas relating to
articles in the each emagazine, allowing you
to give an opinion on the topic, discuss the

article with others, or even ask the author a
question. We are excited about our new UK
classified section. Within this section there
is a free to use jobs and vacancy board. It is
totally free to use this resource.
DentaltownUK also has a huge amount
of educational resources, podcasts and
videos. Within this and future issues of
the emagazine we will direct you to some
of these resources. For example, Howard
Farran has interviewed hundreds of people
who work in dentistry and we will guide you
towards some of these from time to time via
this icon:
To show how this works-the icon below
clicks out to Howard's interview with myself
about dental anxiety management and
hypnosis from last year.

We have had a fantastic response to
our first issue and DentaltownUK will go
from strength to strength. Remember to
look out for flashing yellow when you turn
pages which indicates that there is a link out
to follow to see videos on youtube, visit a
website to learn more about that article, or
link out to an advertiser's website. You can
also click directly on any web address to go
directly to it.
This April issue is packed with
outstanding articles and features from
around the world and here in the UK.
I was going to write some of my
highlights of the issue in my editorial, but to
be honest- I would struggle to highlight only
some- it is all outstanding and I thank all of
the contributors for their efforts!
Enjoy!
Best wishes and Happy Easter
Mike
mike.gow@dentaltownuk.com

Subscribe to the dentaltownuk emagazine
Ensure that you are sent each issue as soon as it is available by
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Remember that this does not automatically register you on for the
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of DentaltownUK April 2017
