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Thomas B. Dodson, DMD, MPH

Thomas B. Dodson is with the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Mass, and the Center for Applied Clinical Investigation, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Thomas B. Dodson, DMD, MPH, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit St, Warren 1201, Boston, MA 02114 (e-mail: tbdodson@partners.org).

	Because this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

After reading Friedman’s article in the Journal ’s Health Policy and Ethics section, casual readers could characterize oral and maxillofacial surgeons as greedy clinicians performing unnecessary procedures with callous disregard for their patients’ pain and risk for complications.¹ As a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon in academic practice and with a background in health policy and management, dental public health, and clinical epidemiology, I would like to respond by addressing each of Friedman’s myths.

Myth 1 is that third molars have a high incidence of pathology. This is not a myth: in an observational cohort study, 25% of participants (aged . . . [Full Text]