Ann Richardson writes a weekly column for a local newspaper chain in Southern New Jersey. She writes about business but also some features and other news stories. She recently interviewed me for her blog.

You can check it out here.

Rudy has just tagged me with this meme. This is the first and probably the last meme I will do, but as I told him, his Blog Fu is better than my Blog Fu so I respect that.

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Gotta get back to work soon, but just ran across this also.

Thanks to The Endo Blog for this. This new terminology hasn’t yet made it into the American Association of Endodontists’ glossary of endodontic terms, but it is much more practical than the terminology commonly in use today.

Endodontic diagnosis generally consists of both a pulpal and periapical diagnosis.

Pulpal Diagnosis:

• Normal pulp – A clinical diagnostic category in which the pulp is symptom free and normally responsive to vitality testing.
• Reversible pulpitis – A clinical diagnosis based upon subjective and objective findings indicating that the inflammation should resolve and the pulp return to normal.
• Irreversible pulpitis – A clinical diagnosis based on subjective and objective findings indicating that the vital inflamed pulp is incapable of healing.

Additional descriptions:

• Symptomatic – Lingering thermal pain, spontaneous pain, referred pain.
• Asymptomatic – No clinical symptoms but inflammation produced by caries, caries excavation, trauma, etc.

• Pulp necrosis – A clinical diagnostic category indicating death of the dental pulp. The pulp is non-responsive to vitality testing.
• Previously Treated – A clinical diagnostic category indicating that the tooth has been endodontically treated and the canals are obturated with various filling materials, other that intracanal medicaments.
• Previously Initiated Therapy – A clinical diagnostic category indicating that the tooth has been previously treated by partial endodontic therapy (e.g. pulpotomy, pulpectomy).

Apical (Periapical) Diagnosis:

• Normal apical tissues – Teeth with normal periradicular tissues that will not be abnormally sensitive to percussion or palpation testing. The lamina dura surrounding the root is intact and the periodontal ligament space is uniform.
• Symptomatic apical periodontitis – Inflammation, usually of the apical periodontium, producing clinical symptoms including painful response to biting and percussion. It may or may not be associated with an apical radiolucent area.
• Asymptomatic apical periodontitis – Inflammation and destruction of apical periodontium that is of pulpal origin, appears as an apical radiolucent area and does not produce clinical symptoms.
• Acute apical abscess - An inflammatory reaction to pulpal infection and necrosis characterized by rapid onset, spontaneous pain, tenderness of the tooth to pressure, pus formation and swelling of associated tissues.
• Chronic apical abscess – An inflammatory reaction to pulpal infection and necrosis characterized by gradual onset, little or no discomfort and the intermittent discharge of pus through an associated sinus tract.

The move is complete but the new blog is not. I’ve successfully imported all of the posts and comments from the old location and will be tweaking them over time to have them fit the style template of the new blog properly. The importation via WordPress was much easier than I thought it was going to be. You will find various things changing with the overall layout as I tweak here and there. It’ll probably be an extended process.

The move consisted of a number of events and decisions:

1. A decision between MovableType or WordPress as the blogging platform needed to be made.
2. I dusted off a .ca domain that I had parked a few years ago and had to change some privacy settings so that people would have to work a little harder to figure out the name of the owner.
3. Adrian needed to set everything up on his server (ie. mySQL, domain forwarding, and email).
4. Importation of the old blog entries.
5. Convincing Ameloblast to let me be the principal author (I reminded him how one day he had balls and the next day he didn’t–what could be next?).
6. And the most difficult decision: Choosing a Style for the blog.

I fiddled around with style after style. I almost settled on a very dark (black) theme but The Girl felt very strongly against it. She reminded me that I still have my balls.

I ended up liking the 3-column Cutline theme by Chris Pearson. As I was looking at it, I realized that I’d seen the 2-column version recently over at a friend’s blog. When I bounced over there to check it out, I found that he had actually reviewed a few themes. This is where I found the theme that I’m using now. There are things that I love with it and things that I don’t. I think I can fix the things that I don’t like but I’ll need to sneak these modifications in when I have time.

In the meantime, blogging continues…