You can create a safe and educational environment to face clinical situation.

Besides students can exercise their skills facing situations that professors develop, as they can face in the future, with real one, with real patients. Also, it is possible to work out skills, improve them, doing the work, over and over again until the student gain confidence enough to do it at clinic

The disadvantages are, that the context is not real, because there is no story about "the patient", saliva, pain, happyness, etc.. So it is important that every procedures that you plan to, you can put it in context.

Before going through clinical practices one should be familiar with the instruments, chair positions and cavity preparations so that there is a less chance of committing mistakes while treating a real patient.

Dentistry is all about art and science,i.e one can treat a patient in a good manner only if pre-clinicals was instructed in a proper way. There may be disadvantage regarding Phantom practice but in a nutshell it has benefits which overcomes the disadvantages.

I agree with the advantages that Deepak said. But as other experiences at Dental Schools and some researchs have proved, the better way to balance advantages and disadvantages is to combine practices at pre clinic with phantoms and practices according their capacity with communities with patients at their real context

I totally agree with you, but there is another opinion. Some dentists do not agree that phantom heads learn and improve skills because they are not represent real patient/mouth. In addition, artificial teeth is different and difficult. Position of tooth is different and mouth opening is different, so it is different. Thank you

Yes, good point. In our Dental School there was an issue to solve. It is fundamental as you said that students rehearse and test one and one again in real teeth not only in plastic. Anyway, if they exercise without real teeth, how you can teach them where is the limit between dentine and pulp, or other things that is is only possible to see with real tissues.

I feel that simulation is a massively underrated teaching and learning technique. Unlike our medical/surgical colleagues phantom heads enable dental students to very closely simulate operative/restorative procedures, allowing them to gain confidence in controlled, standardised conditions that enable us to deliver accurate rankings of their practical abilities and most importantly reduce students 'jump' to the real thing. As the other contributors have stated the bonding of natural tooth crowns to decoronated plastic teeth can raise the simulation to a quality almost identical to the clinical situation. (Albeit saliva & blood free!)

I just learned that in Amsterdam they use virtual reality for practicing and that it feels quite real. Anyone has experience with this tool?

At Dental School of King's College of London, teachers have been working with virtual reality with the advantage that the computador gives inmediately feed back, about clinical procedures and can measured exactly what quantity of tissue the student has removed of the tooth, so improved the fiability in assessment. The experience in this area shows that, one of the important issue in this matter, it is a great difficult to agree aspects to assess between the preclinica tutor. So virtuality gives to students, confidence to work in a quite real environment and better assessment of their work

Greetings from VCU in Richmond VA. I was honored to give a presentation at King's College of London October 2011 and had a chance to try the HapTEL virtual reality system. It was impressive. I also direct the second year Fixed Pros pre-clinical course where students execute preparations on melamine teeth in a mannequin. These environments provide a safe and standardize experience for students, an excellent place to render comparative and meaningful evaluation of the work; all with no risk of patient harm. Secondly they provide a place for struggling students to complete remediation and gain additional practice before treating patients. Students practicing and performing well in the mannequin have been observed to be more likely to preform will in the clinical setting. One disadvantage some colleagues have mentioned is that this experience, and the time invested, do not produce clinic revenue as would be produced if the student was rendering care on a patient paying a fee. However, in my opinion this standardized educational experience offsets the loss in revenue to better assure a quality health care provider.

Greetings from VCU in Richmond VA. I was honored to give a presentation at King's College of London October 2011 and had a chance to try the HapTEL virtual reality system. It was impressive. I also direct the second year Fixed Pros pre-clinical course where students execute preparations on melamine teeth in a mannequin. These environments provide a safe and standardize experience for students, an excellent place to render comparative and meaningful evaluation of the work; all with no risk of patient harm. Secondly they provide a place for struggling students to complete remediation and gain additional practice before treating patients. Students practicing and performing well in the mannequin have been observed to be more likely to preform will in the clinical setting. One disadvantage some colleagues have mentioned is that this experience, and the time invested, do not produce clinic revenue as would be produced if the student was rendering care on a patient paying a fee. However, in my opinion this standardized educational experience offsets the loss in revenue to better assure a quality health care provider.

Good point and thanks to allow us to have better point of view about how this methods of teaching, have impact at students learning. Although I think that one kind of teaching wouldn't interfire in other one. I mean, there are some specifics achievements that you can have with phantoms, but there are other as students have to work in a more closely with reality. The first one is, as you said, a good way to students practices in a safety and standarize experience, and other one, can improve at them an idea more exact how is reality, with real teeth and with people that have fears, expectations, interests and all the social context that students have to practice over an over until they are ready to face with more skills their professional work

I agree Paulina, the methods compliment each other and when used together produce an excellent learning experience. Furthermore, as you point out, there's there's no substitute for patient care and gaining experience at managing the constellation of issues real people bring to the clinic.