Acceptability of the Hall Technique to parents and children.

Objective: To investigate the acceptability of stainless steel crowns placed by dental therapists on children's primary molars using the Hall Technique.

Design: Mixed methods approach, using qualitative inductive analysis and quantitative analysis.

Setting: Hawke's Bay Community Oral Health Service

Methods: One focus group was conducted and ten thirty-minute phone interviews were undertaken with parents of children who had previously had a stainless steel crown placed using the Hall Technique (over the period 1 December 2011 to 31 May 2012).

Is it health or the burial environment: differentiating between hypomineralised and post-mortem stained enamel in an archaeological context.

Developmental enamel defects are often used as indicators of general health in past archaeological populations. However, it can be difficult to macroscopically distinguish subtle hypomineralised opacities from post-mortem staining, unrelated to developmental defects. To overcome this difficulty, we have used non-destructive x-ray microtomography to estimate the mineral density of enamel.