Is there a real big difference between a dmd and dds?

As early as 1930 The University of Pennsylvania felt that all of the health professional schools (Med, Dental, Vet) should integrate the medical model into their curricula. Penn and a few other schools tried very hard to have these schools teach the first two years as "materia medica". The theory was to understand the body as a whole physiologically and to expand the students' awareness to the full array of body anatomy/biological sciences. To that end, Penn offered the DMD in 1964 to nominally indicate their purpose. As times have changed, the 2 degrees are exactly the same. There are better and worse schools, or schools that are more mechanically oriented and some that are more didactically oriented; but that is an argument that will never be settled, as each school feels they are superior. There are great dentists and spectacularly bad dentists, and it has nothing to do with the accredited schools they graduated from. There are great electricians and bad ones, and such is life. I have a DMD, and I would be just as happy to have DDS appended to my name. I love what I do, and that is what matters. It is a moot debate that has no reason for existing in the present academic world of dentistry. The joke is: the person who graduated last in my class was given a DMD, the person who graduated first in the class at say UCLA or (insert name) was given a DDS, GUESS who is a better dentist? It makes NO difference.