[The evaluation of self-care workshops to carriers of chronic periodontitis: taking care of users and dentists].

The objective of this article is to evaluate the workshops of "accepting the patient" for dentists and of self-care for carriers of chronic periodontitis. The patients assisted at the periodontics clinics of graduation and post-graduation Dentistry courses and periodontics specialty students, in Fortaleza, Ceará State, Brazil, took part of educative workshops. A field diary was done in all workshops. The patients of both interventions and control groups answered a structured questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of the treatment. In order to compare the previous and post moments, in both groups, a McNemar test was performed, with a probability of p<0.05. In the intervention group, there was an increase in knowledge related to the name, the causes and related factors of the disease (p < 0.05). In the control group there wasn't a rise in the understanding of the diseases' chronic character, unlike the intervention group. The dentists showed few abilities in dealing with chronic patients. It can be concluded that the educative workshops for carriers of chronic periodontitis increase the knowledge about the illness, its causes and its chronic character, especially by the pedagogical methodology used and the dialogue with the popular culture.