The Intake of Pain Medication among Dentists and Dental Assistants with Musculoskeletal Disorders in Germany

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

 

Thank you for your interesting study. Your results will contribute to better understanding of this important problem and pointing out the importance of recommending potential preventive activities.

 

Be so kind as to correct several minor mistakes. In the Abstract session, I have noticed several mistakes in the text (dash within the word), that should be corrected:

 

Musculoskele-tal

Muscu-loskeletal

Occupa-tional

A sin-gle

 

Thank you.

Author Response

Be so kind as to correct several minor mistakes. In the Abstract session, I have noticed several mistakes in the text (dash within the word), that should be corrected:

 

Musculoskele-tal

Muscu-loskeletal

Occupa-tional

A sin-gle

 

à Thank you for noticing, but in the script we got back from the editor we could not find those errors.

Reviewer 2 Report

This publication is of interest to public health, indeed the use of drugs to reduce pain in musculoskeletal disorders is relevant, especially among medical professionals.
In the course of reading it, a number of comments arose.
1. I did not see the hypothesis of the study
2. the date of the ethical protocol is not given
3. it is not clear - were the women pregnant - because this may distort the results of the study, should then expand the exclusion criteria.
4. the platform that was used for the online questionnaires -was safe, maybe that should be specified.
5. were comorbidities taken into account - e.g. rheumatic diseases - maybe that's why or because of the attacks they were taking medication.
6. check literature sources - some are quite old, maybe replace them?

7. also tables 5 and 6 are difficult to understand - can they be presented in a different form

Author Response

1. I did not see the hypothesis of the study

à We included three hypotheses at the end of the introduction.

2. 
   the date of the ethical protocol is not given
   à We added the date of the ethical protocol (07/02/2018).
3. it is not clear - were the women pregnant - because this may distort the results of the study, should then expand the exclusion criteria.
   à Thank you for this input! We didn’t ask women if they were pregnant. We mentioned this resulting limitation in the discussion in line 322f.
4. the platform that was used for the online questionnaires -was safe, maybe that should be specified.
   à We specified this at the appropriate place.
5. were comorbidities taken into account - e.g. rheumatic diseases - maybe that's why or because of the attacks they were taking medication.
   à This is a variable we thought about as well. Due to our focus to document the intake of pain medication between Ds and DAs we think this might be interesting for upcoming examinations. We mentioned this aspect as limitation in the discussion.
6. check literature sources - some are quite old, maybe replace them?

à We discussed this in the group and decided to look for literature that is as specific as possible and very close to the topic. For this, we consciously made the compromise of choosing literature that is maybe older but specific. There is a limited number of actual international sources concerning the MSDs and especially the intake of pain medication.

7. also tables 5 and 6 are difficult to understand - can they be presented in a different form

à Thank you for your comment. We had many different medicines answered by the participants. We already tried to build main groups to reduce the number of single medicines. We think that the medicine that is now mentioned is quite interesting and should not be build up in further and bigger groups. Irrespective of this, we have improved the layout of these two tables.

Reviewer 3 Report

Congratulation for the wonderful paper. Thank you for this helpful contribution. I applaud the effort of promoting studies for the investigation of pain medication. I appreciate their methods including study design and data analysis. I write some comments below that could benefit the article.

Tables and figures should follow the same arrangement throughout the manuscript.

Tables 1-6. Information is shown in duplicate. If it appears in the table, delete the information from the text.

Some empty lines are observed, delete it.

References. Books are not science.

Congratulation again!!!

Author Response

Tables and figures should follow the same arrangement throughout the manuscript.

à Thank you for your comment. We now have a consistent layout for all tables. Unfortunately, the revision of the tables is only for tables 5 and 6 in tracking mode.

Tables 1-6. Information is shown in duplicate. If it appears in the table, delete the information from the text.

à Due to the many numbers in the table, we thought it might be helpful to have a quick overview of the numbers in the text. We tried to shorten the text but with still having the most important information left in the text.

Some empty lines are observed, delete it.

References. Books are not science.

Congratulation again!!!

à Thank you very much for your appreciation.

Reviewer 4 Report

1. The study presents the results of original research.

2. Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

3. Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

4. Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

5. The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.

6. The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

7. The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

Author Response

Since there were no comments here that we should address, we would like to take this opportunity to thank the reviewer for his/her efforts.