• Journal of Oral Medicine and Pain
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.317-322
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• 2008

The moderners of industrial society suffer from various stresses, which bring about increase in prevalence of temporomandibular disorders, oral mucosal disease and chronic neuropathic pain, therefore, the number of patients seeking help of those symptoms tend to increase. The purpose of this study was to discuss the importance of oral medicine related disease by investigating questions that appeared in cyber consultation of Kangnung National University Dental Hospital web site. Among the nearly 2000 questions, the rate of questions related to oral medicine was 20.92%, and the rate of questions related to other departments were oral and maxillofacial surgery 16.87%, conservative dentistry 16.67%, orthodontics 14.02%, prosthodontics 12.25%, periodontics 8.36%, pediatric dentistry 4.93%, preventive dentistry 2.08% and otherwise questions 3.90%. Among the 403 questions related to oral medicine, the frequent questions were oral mucosal diseases 44.17%, temporomandibular disorders 41.19%, halitosis 4.47%, xerostomia 3.23%, other orofacial pain 2.23%, forensic dentistry 1.49% and otherwise questions 2.98%. From the higher rate of questions related to oral medicine compared with other fields of dentistry, we would consider that the people are considerably concerned about the oral medicine related disease, such as oral mucosal diseases and temporomandibular disorders.