In the clinic last week, I saw a lady that I haven’t seen since 2011.
We did a sinus graft on her upper right, upper left and placed implants simultaneously; way before we did any research surrounding this and way before we were teaching.
She had come back to see me because she had teeth failing in another part of her mouth and wanted to discuss options of implants again. It turns out that about half the new patients I see now I’ve actually seen before.
The photograph attached to this blog is one of her x-rays – I have full consent to show this from her, she is happy for me to show it off.
At the time, I was about 3 years into the process of sinus grafting when I saw this lady. We couldn’t be absolutely sure how well it worked or not because we hadn’t counted it.
University of Bern had counted it though and so I thought if we tried our best to follow the protocols that they had used, but did that in practice, then we might get a similar sort of outcome.
In a fortnight, we will be 10 years into this process. The results are quite staggering (at least to me). Not everybody who has this procedure continues to return to the practice for review appointments and there is a steady drop off over time despite the way that we guarantee our implants.
That said, of the people that we get back 97% of them or more still have their implants in place and are functioning well without disease.
We tend to find that even if people have decided to drop off the recall they come back to us if they get a problem.
We’re very open to working with this and treating this, in fact one of the cases over the last 10 years we were actually contacted by another practice who had asked us to see a patient because we treated them originally; most of the problems come back.
This is not fool proof because we’re not recalling every single patient because in real life that is not practical, but from the patients that we have in our own practice who return back for recall year after year, and from the experience of patients coming back if they need to see us, this procedure is really quite successful in the right hands and done the right way.
Finally, it’s not a procedure for exceptional clinicians at the top 10% of the bell curve.
You can teach people how to do this it turns out, and you can teach them how to do it predictably (because somebody taught me).
The trick then is to stick with the formula, not push the envelope too far and then work at it for 10 years.
(Our sinus course is almost full but there might be one or two places left if you’re quick. If not, why don’t you put it in our diary for next year or put it in your PDP)
Blog post number: 1592
Leave a comment