Editorial
Life long learning in a world of globalized knowledge
Jean-François Roulet DDS, PhD, Prof hc
Professor University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Dear Readers, We live in a world that is dramatically different from the world I was born into more than 65 years ago. When I was a student, my main source of information was textbooks. As a young researcher I learned that journals are the source of the most recent advances in my profession. The library was the location where every project started: search the literature. For information on the daily life we usually relied on the local newspaper. Today everything is different. We not only produce much more information and renew knowledge on a much faster pace, but due to the internet, information becomes globally available usually a short time after it happened. If I want to go to the movies, I just consult a local website, where all the movie programs of the week are listed. I can even buy the tickets right away and select my favorite seats. At home in Gainesville, Florida I watch the Swiss TV news and I am informed about a flood that happened a few hours before in the area I used to live. If I want to know something, a scientific fact or something about a person, I just access the internet, log in to a known search engine and within seconds I have a multitude of information. So someone should think that life long learning has become very easy and that we are moving to a totally informed society. Unfortunately the contrary is happening. It has become much more difficult to be informed, not only because we are almost drowning in the sea of information, but also because there is a problem related to the validity / truthfulness of the information. You can see this, if you search a topic you are very familiar with. I just tested this again on May 3rd 2016 by looking up“ amalgam” on a very well known search engine. The result: 8,700,000 hits in 0.41 seconds – impressive, but how to digest that huge amount of information – impossible. So, as everybody would probably do it, I start to look into the first hit: there I find quite a neutral description of what amalgam is, however with quite some inaccuracies. Furthermore the concerns of the group of people that believe that amalgam is toxic and dangerous for the patient and the dentist’ s health are reported without validation. I personally know that, based on solid research, these concerns can clearly be reduced to a risk which is much smaller than taking an aspirin against a headache. Two entries down the road I find an link offered by a tooth paste producer“ Dental Amalgam: A Health Risk”. There Amalgam and its toxicity is explained in lay terms quite reasonably, but not without errors. And finally amalgam entry # 9 is called“ Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions” which is the view of the hard core anti amalgam fraction, naming all the false arguments to make you believe that amalgam is a serious and deadly health risk …. I could tell exactly the same story about fluoride( 20,000,000 hits with much more vigorous and contradictory argumentation; the internet offers automatically as search keywords“ fluoride dangers, fluoride conspiracy, fluoride side effects and fluoride in water”) or any other topic I consider myself competent about. So how should a consumer know which source to trust? My answer as an editor is clear and loud:“ read a peer reviewed scientific journal!” Andreas Linde, the Editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Dental Research once said:“ Nothing is scientifically“ shown” or“ proven” before it has been published in a scientific journal with a peer review system, so one can critically judge what was done, how it was done and evaluate how solid it is.” How is this accomplished? Every peer reviewed journal usually has a