Sir, I read Bill Kellner-Read's 'Opinion' article (BDJ 2007; 202: 593–595) with great interest. I have known Bill for almost 30 years, ever since he played a major role in my personal quantum leap from treating 'the white bits only' to treating complete people, yet I am still taken aback by his clarity of thought and the depth of his insight.

There is ever-increasing evidence that we dentists need to raise our game as well as our vision, and to pay more than lip service to the concept that our patients are whole people who need to be assessed and treated as such. It is no longer enough to trot out the old adages about dentists diagnosing and impacting on systemic diseases through oral examination, true and important though they may be. We need to learn a whole lot more about how dentistry connects physically with the cranium, the cervical spine and rest of the spine. We need to learn that if the cervical spine is compromised, then so is the lumbar spine, through the intricate structural and neurological connections. We have to acquire a whole new set of additional values that encompass the concept of what is becoming known as structural dentistry.

The scientific evidence for these phenomena may well be absent from the dental literature, but it is present in abundance in the osteopathy and chiropractic literature.

All joints have two bony components and dentistry alone cannot comprehensively treat temporomandibular joint disorders, because we do not yet have the skills to treat the other (temporal bone) half of the joint. We require a craniopath to identify and correct, for example, the misalignment of the temporal bones and the glenoid fossae that prevents the TM joints from functioning in synchrony.

We need to be part of the growing understanding that orthodontic malocclusion is a cranial event, caused by imbalances in cranio-facial growth and development, and that if we treat these patients purely dentally, we are not only missing the point of what we are doing, but we are possibly committing the patient to a high probability of relapse.

Treating the result does not address the cause.

Understanding the functionality of the cranial bones has been denied us as a profession through narrow undergraduate training because of the accepted convention of handing down the information from one generation of dental students, and their teachers, to the next.

The academic side of this process has prevented teachers from looking at other disciplines such as chiropractic and osteopathy simply because they do not get published in our own literature, and therefore in effect they do not exist. In any case, to teach such stuff to their students would almost certainly be seen as heresy.

Curiously, of all the health care professions, dentistry is ideally-placed to grasp the principles of cranial bone motion; we only have to see that cranial suture fibres are essentially the same as periodontal fibres. Ipso facto they must surely perform similar functions – micro-movement and shock-absorption. Once this is realised, one is well on the way to understanding, and believing, that the cranial bones can actually move.

I am pleased that the BDJ now permits us the right to publish these views so that these fascinating ideas are out in the open and up for discussion. I am ever hopeful that the mandarins of the dental establishment may yet be persuaded to reconsider their viewpoints.