Abstract
Purpose: This article describes the diagnosis of a patient exhibiting tooth pain using structured pain interview sheets and the TMD*+OFP** diagnostic protocol (including cranial nerves test. The diagnosis of tooth pain is a constant challenge to the dental practitioner. Moreover, only a dentist can diagnose tooth pain. Therefore, the dentist must diagnose the patient based on the accurate information regarding his or her current medical state and history, while taking into account other information and knowledge about disease mechanisms and treatment. The accurate diagnosis helps concerted efforts to treat the patient with the help of other departments, as well. However, dentists with little clinical experience or even dentists with considerable clinical experience when faced with complex cases often face difficulties. This study examined the efficacy of using structured pain interview sheets for hypothetico-deductive clinical diagnostic reasoning methods and data gathering and the TMD+OFP diagnostic protocol (including cranial nerves test) for diagnosis.
Study selection: We used the following five steps to diagnose pain in a patient who complained of tooth pain in the left mandibular molar region. Step 1: comprehensive history taking; Step 2: enumeration of diagnostic hypotheses; Step 3: revision of diagnostic hypotheses; Step 4: confirmation of diagnostic hypothesis; Step 5: final diagnosis. We used structured pain interview sheets and the TMD+OFP diagnostic protocol (including cranial nerves test) in Steps 1 and 3, respectively.
Result: A definitive diagnosis was reached for the patient. Treatment was selected based on the diagnoses, and the patient was completely cured.
Conclusions: We confirmed the efficacy of the clinical diagnostic reasoning using the structured pain interview sheet and the TMD+OFP diagnostic protocol (including cranial nerves test) for diagnosis of tooth pain in a patient.
