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Spring 2019 Newsletter: Message from the President

Dear AAOM Colleagues,

I am humbled and honored to lead our Academy into the 75th year of service to the public. We, the Academy and its members, certainly improve lives through boldly leading the integration of medicine and dentistry.

I am grateful for the dedication and energy of the officers who serve on the Executive Committee, the many committee members, committee chairs and past presidents, (in particular our Immediate Past-President Eric Stoopler for an exceptional year), and our Executive Director Michele Reeder and her SBI team who do an outstanding job managing our Academy.

The recent 2019 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA, Oral Medicine at the Crossroads of Interdisciplinary Healthcare, was a spectacular educational meeting, and offered outstanding recognition to the scientific content provided by many of you, overseen by Scientific Sessions co-Chairs Arwa Farag and Allesandro Villa, Abstracts Subcommittee co-Chairs Kentaro Ikeda and Bhavik Desai and the organizational skills of our National Meeting Committee Chair Craig Hatch and the SBI team.

During this meeting, we submitted our Oral Medicine Specialty Recognition Application to the National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards. We are hopeful that ADA specialty recognition of Oral Medicine will be accomplished by our next annual meeting and this recognition will increase the public awareness of the solutions we can provide to diagnosing and managing many challenging oral mucosal, salivary gland and orofacial pain conditions, and oral consequences of systemic disease. Those among us who manage patients with complex medical problems provide critical service to the public that can be accomplished by few others. We are indebted to our Oral Medicine colleagues in the U.S. and throughout the world who have in the past and who continue today to lay the scientific groundwork for our specialty. Special thanks to Craig Miller, who has been steadfast in leading our pursuit of specialty recognition, and to Nathaniel Treister for helping to put the final polish on our application.

Please mark your calendar for our 2019 Fall Meeting, to be held on Saturday, November 9, in Cleveland, OH. Andres Pinto will lead this interdisciplinary continuing education program on Improving Outcomes for Orofacial Pain - a Team Approach. This will prove to be an exciting meeting in the home of the new Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinics collaborative health education campus.

We have an exciting year ahead as we work together through many active projects and take on additional ones with the goal to raise Oral Medicine to higher national and international stature and to create improved recognition of the important impact of your daily work. I encourage you to actively participate with the Academy over the next year and am looking forward to seeing you all again at our 2020 annual conference at the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando, FL, as we culminate the year with a special celebration of our Academy’s founding in 1945.

Have a wonderful summer!

Lauren L. Patton, DDS, DABOM