Sir, your editorial Periodontal diseases – who cares? (BDJ 2011; 210: 565) is most timely. Not least, unlike some periodontists, in that you correctly use the term 'periodontal diseases'. Our many colleagues who are not periodontists have indeed the right to expect clear guidance from those particular specialists. Part of the problem, I suggest, is our failure as the dental profession to make patients aware that we are physicians as well as surgeons, and that while, like our other general medical colleagues we, too, have to diagnose as wide a range of disease as that affecting any other body organ or system, we have to spend most of our time with a patient in actual mechanical/surgical treatment. The result is that our medical role is forgotten, and few recognise the dentist as physician.1

Perhaps the increasing evidence of the relevance of the chronic inflammatory periodontal diseases to a wide range of systemic diseases of high morbidity and mortality2 may concentrate the dental mind, and also open that mind to the wide range of non-CIPD diseases that can affect the periodontal diseases,3 and, additionally, renew the links between periodontology and oral medicine. As Victor Hugo said, nothing has the force of an idea whose time has come, and certainly periodontal medicine is here to stay.4 The primary concern of the periodontist, as of all of the dental team, must be the preservation of the natural dentition, for which titanium may not always be the best substitute, not least for an increasingly long-living population.