Continuing with our cover series on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we reach SDG 3: Good Health and Wellbeing. The mission behind this goal is to ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages, something all dental professionals play a key role in delivering. Stephen Hancocks, Editor-in-Chief, provides further insight into why this goal is so crucial and relevant to dentistry.

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Historically, in the UK particularly, we have focused on the mouth as our primary area of attention, sometimes it seems to the frank exclusion of all else, especially to the fact that there is a person somewhere attached to it. There is some explanation to this, even if no logical justification, as our main aim from the second half of the twentieth century onwards was the treatment of the ravages of disease, particularly caries. As we have valiantly managed to get this under some degree of control, we have also been able to spend time to ask how this situation came about and what we might do to ensure it is not repeated.

Discovering the aetiology of the main oral conditions, we are in the difficult process of embracing prevention and shifting towards what is variously termed holistic care, whole body awareness and multidisciplinary practice. In essence, it is the realisation that far from being detached from the rest of our body, the mouth is both an important part of it and it, in turn, a vitally connected influence on the oral cavity. Oftentimes nowadays, we quote this in terms of the parallel courses of diabetes and periodontal disease or cardiovascular conditions as headline linkages. However, the threads of interconnectedness run deep. Take minimal interventive dentistry, for example. At first consideration, what has this to do with good health and wellbeing? A short amount of consideration makes one realise that it is intimately involved with diet, lifestyle and perhaps as importantly, attitude.

An increasing number of our patients are now very knowledgeable about health and welfare, expecting not only to have answers to an immediate condition but how that impacts on their life, family and career. And if that seems a step too far too soon, consider for a moment our own situation as dental professionals being frequently advised with regards to work-life balance, avoiding burnout and taking care of ourselves (assuming that we already know well how best to guard our own oral health).

This is perhaps where the UN's SDGs have their greatest value in bringing into our daily routines a greater awareness of a wider world, literally and metaphorically. What do health and wellbeing have to do with me as a dental professional? Everything.