Internet Resources for Dental Pharmacology

The current availability of a vast number of internet-based informational resources poses a challenge for the busy dental practitioner. While many of these electronic publications are authoritative and science-based, many are not, and the dentist searching for reliable information on drugs and drug interactions can waste valuable time trying to discern their qualitative differences. While new web resources become available almost on a daily basis, many high-quality ones have been available for years and can be confidently recommended. This chapter provides the dental team with a list and brief summary of these authoritative internet references, most of which are promulgated by respected professional dental organizations (including the dental specialties) and which can be relied upon for current and regularly updated material. This chapter also provides suggestions for searching the more comprehensive databases (e.g., PubMed, National Library of Medicine) to access abstracts of important articles from individual journals and, frequently, download the entire article from free text sources. Many of the websites described herein contain a wide variety of non-pharmacologic information, too. The reader is reminded of two very important considerations before using any internet-based information in managing patient care—first, summaries of scientific articles written for public internet sites in “plain English” format may be biased and partly or entirely designed to suit a commercial/marketing purpose, and second many internet sites may contain out-of-date and even harmful information. Caveat emptor.