COMPREHENSIVE PEDIATRIC CARE-Reply

To the Editor.—We agree with Dr. Forrester that any comprehensive care program should include dental services and the health team should include the dentist. Unfortunately enough, the "should" and the "is" are usually separated by the gap of practical realities. At the time when our research project started in 1964, it was, for practical reasons, impossible to add a dentist to our health team, although the families in our program did receive limited dental care. We believe that "good" comprehensive care leads to better dental health, but will not know this from our study. To have included dental care for the experimental families would also have meant introducing another variable which could have influenced outcome.

Dr. Schoen correctly points out that in the experimental program the continuity of care delivered by the physicians was limited because this service was delivered by physicians participating in an educational fellowship of one