In the past few decades, the field of TMJ has expanded to temporomandibular disorders and orofacial pains, thereby increasing the need for our academies and teaching institutions to incorporate new information for our potential budding specialty.
Unfortunately, it seems, we still have not learned from our mentors as to what is needed to successfully gain a specialty status from the American Dental Association.
We were told to get together to come up with a collaborative effort to show the rest of our dental colleagues what would go into the specialty. It is only now that individuals in the American Academy of Orofacial Pain and American Academy of Craniofacial Pain have pushed the ADA to reconsider the need for specialty status.
To add to this, all of the Academies are now touting their individual leadership in the area of dental sleep medicine, which has opened a further rift within our groups.
Each academy and group now also has its own board certification exam, so it is increasingly difficult for an individual to decide in which direction to turn for proper education.
This leaves our institutions to try to teach both sides of the educational and clinical picture until the ADA has further guidelines in place. This is why it is imperative that all of us come together and collectively approach the ADA to urge it to create a specialty that has a large enough umbrella to house all of our disparate parts.