Sports dentistry is not just the fabrication of mouthguards and treatment of trauma. The practitioner who volunteers with a local youth or school team is making a significant contribution to the community and advancing oral health by helping prevent dental trauma.
Sports dentistry is certain to be a part of our future. As stated, dentistry has an important role in the athlete’s health and consequently on performance. The presence of a Dentist in athlete support staff is of paramount importance. For the prevention of sports-related oral and maxillofacial trauma.
Knowledge about sports is important in order to provide prompt and specialized treatment for a dental emergency and educate coaches, trainers, athletes and parents about the sports related dental injuries, the risk factors associated, diagnosis, first-aid treatment and preventive measures.
The importance of good oral health and the role of dentists is being recognized as essential to performance with the increasing popularity of recreational sports and increasing demands on professional athletes.
I’d like to take this opportunity to state, that Indian Dental Association (IDA) is always at the forefront of promoting good oral health and, essentially an athlete’s overall health. The importance of good oral health and the role of dentists are today being recognized as essential to performance of all athletes.
Sports Dentistry is an evolving field and it is our duty as dentists to get the team, coaches, and training staff all on the same page to help reinforce good habits. Educate them about good oral health regimes and the effect that nutrition and diet can have on their oral health. This can make a difference between their success and failure.
Dr Ashok Dhoble
Hon. Secretary General
Indian Dental Association
Dear fraternity members ,
Greetings from Indian Academy of Sports Dentistry! – an unique and one of its kind organizations in our country - an initiative of IDA HO
Sports, both in recreational and competitive forms has permeated into our lives as an important aspect of fitness, wellness, and health. The new education policy and Khelo India has fast tracked the change in mindset and perception towards sports and is bringing children to the sports field early with motivation, assistance, and recognition.
The growing consumer demand has propelled sports into a multi-billion-dollar global industry with a market size of over 16 billion INR in the year 2020. As sports grows so does the demand for sports medicine – a market expected to exceed more than US$ 852 million by 2025 at a CAGR of 15.5% between 2022-2027 and grow steadily to over 9.64 billion by 2031.
FDI adopted Sports Dentistry as a speciality at the General Assembly in Sept 2016 in Poland. However, the outreach and impact of this adoption has not reached its optimum – essentially due to two reasons – one, being that we as a profession have not been able to educate the impact that good oral and preventive health has on sports outcomes amongst the sportspersons and associated stakeholders and policy makers. The second being that our dental curriculum has not included Sports Dentistry as an important topic. Hence the knowledge gap remains amongst our professional fraternity. Dentistry must be cognizant of the growing consumer demands and alter and align to the market calling.
We at IDA HO, through IASD aims to close this gap by providing educational opportunities for knowledge skill up and scale up their dental clinics and offices to be centres for sports dentistry. This will enable us to increase the market presence of dentistry and be care providers in the expanding sports industry while providing lateral growth for existing practices and new and niche employment opportunities for our budding young dental surgeons.
I welcome you to join Indian Academy of Sports Dentistry and contribute by your personal and professional presence in the growing market of Sports industry by being a certified Sports Dentists. Let’s together make a difference with pride to health of our Sports persons and our Nations sporting outcomes and medal tally.
Best wishes
Dr Reena Kumar
Academic Director
Indian Academy of Sports Dentistry