Power in Dentistry: A Foucauldian Shift in South Korea

Abstract

The established method of understanding power in dentistry is based on the early Foucauldian discourse that dentistry enforces oral health discipline to the people on behalf of state power. This exhibits the hierarchy between dentists and patients, which clearly appears in clinical dentistry and effectively explains the responsibility of oral care assigned to patients. However, there presents no way to becoming free from the framework in the discourse as a resistance. Beyond the political aspect of the medico-sociological framework, this paper seeks a different way to understand power in dentistry through ‘care of the self’, a late Foucauldian concept. First, based on the current discussion of the dentist-patient relationship (DPR), the paper examines two trends of clinical dental treatments in South Korea. The high prevalence of dental implant and orthognathic surgery indicates that traditional prejudices including ableism and pursuit of Western beauty still remain in South Korea albeit with the society overcoming paternalism in DPRs. These dental phenomena, however, contain excesses that cannot be explained only by traditional prejudice, and this paper attempts to interpret them as the pursuit of care of the self that appears in the dentist’s professionalism and the patient’s self-determination. In dentistry, care of the self can be introduced in the form of empowerment, which is implemented through the improvement of oral health literacy and shared decision-making. This paper argues that this interpretation helps surmount the traditional dyadic model of the DPR and revise the understanding of power in dentistry.