Todos iguais? Conhecendo o perfil dos profissionais odontólogos da harmonização orofacial

Abstract

In Brazilian society, the current beauty standards displayed by the media and the high value of aesthetics, has made the search for Orofacial Harmonization (HOF) procedures more frequent in the offices of health professionals, including dentists. HOF is a rapid therapeutic procedure, minimally invasive and safe, which provides the recovery of patients' self-esteem. This study aims to outline the profile of dentists in the area of HOF, in the southeastern region of Brazil; understand the reasons that led these professionals to seek specialization in the aesthetic area; identify if there was an influence of the choice for this specialty due to digital marketing; evaluate the content of the content shared by the professional's social networks related to HOF. This is a quantitative and qualitative study, using social networks (WhatsApp) to recruit participants, with the application of an online questionnaire (Google Forms) containing socioeconomic, demographic and professional questions. For the qualitative approach, the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) was used, which analyzes health education materials published on social networks (Instagram). 90 publications by these users were evaluated, observing the number of followers, number of educational/professional posts, among other metrics. The results indicate that of the 30 participants, 50% of the professionals working in the HOF are young people aged 20-30 years; 63.3% white; 83.3% are female; 66.7% declared themselves cisgender; 90% are heterosexual. As for the professional profile, 63.3% receive up to 5 to 10 minimum wages; 53.3% of the professionals have a workload of less than 44 hours per week; 73% are self-employed, working in their own, rented or other professional's offices; 76.7% consider the training adequate for the labor market; 73% are trained in private institutions. Approximately 70% of participants have on average less than 10 years of training at HOF; 46.7% have an immersion course, 36.7% have a specialization in HOF. Regarding the health education materials published on social networks, it was possible to observe that most of the posts were barely understandable and not very actionable, with each profile having an average of 466 posts with an average of 15,330 followers, and the posts of each profile had, on average, 46.29% of an educational/professional nature. The findings of this study revealed that in the HOF, young, white, cisgender and heterosexual women are the majority, consistent with the results found in other studies, in which there was a predominance of female professionals in the area of aesthetics and HOF. Regarding the analysis of social media, it is observed how the profiles of professionals do not seek to convey reliable information about orofacial harmonization, its advantages and disadvantages, which cases really need a procedure of this type, but focus on demonstrating "before x after" of patients and, consequently, helping in the dissemination of a standard of beauty and, consequently, Thus, encouraging more and more people to be interested in these procedures.