Students Win Video Competition With Team Work and Dental Humor

The American Dental Association's Principles of Ethics and Code of Conduct may uplift the dental profession, but it's not very entertaining.

RSDM students helped change that with a comic video that won second place in an ADA  competition to make the code more compelling.

Their entry, titled "ADA Code of Super Dentist," featured a super hero mentor and his hero-in-training illustrating all five points of the code: justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, veracity and patient autonomy.

The ADA held the competition to find an attenion-grabbing way to help dental students explore ethical dilemmas they might face in real life

Scenarios ranged from "Super Dentist" rescuing a victim from the Plaque Pack, who accost her with a chocolate bar, to the apprentice heroine's misguided attempt to punish a Pack member by replacing his teeth with Chiclets.  ("I told him they were real teeth,'' she says conspiratorially).

Starring Class of 2019 president Tom Viccaro as the super hero and Angie Lo as Scrub, the trainee, the video was a collaborative effort among six third-year students, who spent hours writing the screenplay and shooting scenes. They included Imran Uddin, Anush Shah, Harsh Patel and Jasmine Singson.

At first, developing the concept was slow, with false starts, creative blocks and characters that never made the cut. "We just threw out ideas like darts,'' says Vicarro. "After awhile, one person would go, 'Timmy the Tooth -- that's all I got.''' But eventually, they came up with the winning  plot line — in addition to dialogue spiked with dental school humor. When the Plaque Pack victim is attacked, she cries, "Please, I have low saliva flow...high caries risk!"

Although the video lost by one vote to Pacific Northwest University dental school, the RSDM students received a $1,500 prize and their video will be screened at an upcoming ADA conference. In the meantime, they're already thinking of next year's entry. "We're coming back to win,'' declared Lo.