1 - Introduction

This chapter presents the case for a person-centred approach in oral health care and oral health research using dentine hypersensitivity as a case-study.Dentine hypersensitivity is characterized by the presence of pain in the absence of any other cause. Even though the definition requires the effected person to report the pain, it omits any reference to that person. This omission encourages the mistaken belief that the diagnosis of hypersensitivity is objective. Furthermore, despite this key role of the person, very little research has studied what it is like for a person to live with the condition.This introduction critiques the purely biomedical approach to dentine hypersensitivity and starts to map out how biomedicine should be complemented with an appreciation of the psychosocial aspects of oral health and disease. It describes how this perspective can be implemented using the ideas of health related quality of life and oral health related quality of life and stresses the need for the appropriate use of theory in this work.