Introduction:
Low-income populations have a higher prevalence of oral diseases and often experience financial as well as other barriers to dental services.1 Access to health care is limited in rural communities.2,3 Compared to urban and suburban communities, rural communities have relatively few dentists.4,5 As a result, these groups often are either forced or chose to use alternative strategies, forgo treatment, and/or use or self-care remedies for relief of dental pain. Self-care is one of the means by which such people can actively engage in managing their oral health problems without access to professional care.1,6 Self-care is the component of health self-management that includes behaviors undertaken to enhance health, prevent disease, limit illness, or restore health.7 They derive from the individual’s knowledge and skills.8
Gilbert et al. explored dental self-care behaviors among problem-oriented dental attenders and regular dental attenders. They reported that dental self-care behaviors included changes in diet, use of over-the-counter pain relievers, and homemade remedies to treat toothache and bleeding
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The study was done on a representative sample of 630 individuals belonging to low socio-economic strata residing in rural India.
This study was especially focused on low socio-economic people as these people have a higher prevalence of oral disease,12 often experience dental pain, and they frequently face financial as well as other barriers to private dental practice.13 In this study Pareek scale was utilized to measure SES of the family, which is a widely used classification for rural population in India. It is simple to implement and possess a good reliability.9 The key finding of this study is that dental pain affects a significant proportion of this population and it has forced the participants to use a number of self-care