Prise en charge des urgences en odontologie : de la nécessité d'une réflexion éthique

Emergency dental care most often involves acute and uncontrollable pain for patients making them highly dependent on dentists. Yet, access to emergency care can be a challenging one for patients: it is not uncommon that they encounter difficulty or even the impossibility of obtaining a rapid appointment. The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss the ethical tensions underlying the problem of access to emergency dental care in the French healthcare system and to question the very notion of emergency applied to odontology.