Apart from its private practice essence, dental services differ from other outpatient health care fields because of a focus on providing tangible treatments; patients leave a dental practice fully aware that procedures were done in their mouths, and sometimes are told to re-attend for further physical interventions in follow-up appointments.
For example, Sbaraini et al. found that many Australian dentists considered some patients too "unreliable" to benefit from prevention counselling, so tangible restorative treatment offered "value for money" [ 22].
Clinically warranted switches often confer tangible benefits by enhancing treatment effectiveness and tolerability, and overall treatment acceptance by patients [ 4, 6, 11].
The information needs of the women we interviewed was met for most of the tangible, practical aspects of treatment and care, such as diagnosis, tests and treatments, but much less so for the psychosocial aspects, such as whether the disease was under control and how to cope at home.
However, we still need more resources, more research and attention from the global community to get tangible results on prevention, treatment and patient care.
That is partly because treatment programs produce tangible, dramatic evidence of money well spent, while an averted infection is almost impossible to show, even though prevention is more cost-effective in the long run, the panel's experts say.
C.A.: It comes down to the science by which fundamental discoveries are turned into tangible improvements in prevention and treatment and disease.
However, despite tangible improvements in diagnosis and treatment, marked differences in cancer survival across European regions exist (Sant et al, 2001).
A study with consistent PCR testing beyond 30 days would be instructive in delineating whether pre-emptive treatment confers a tangible survival benefit over empirical therapy.
