This week on Thursday I spoke to the ITI annual scientific meeting (obviously via webinar link).
This time next year I hope I’ll be celebrating the fact that we held the ITI congress in Edinburgh at the start of October, in which I’m lucky enough to be one of the organizing committees members.
I was asked to do a short 20-minute lecture this time though on guided surgery and digital implant planning (20 minutes is short for me for anyone who’s ever seen me speak).
It takes ages to prepare a 20-minute lecture, probably even more than it does to prepare a 1-hour lecture due to the trying to cut things out and to decide what to squeeze in.
The most important thing about digital implant planning though is to cut through the stuff that the companies talk about with it’s benefits and get to the true advantages.
The first advantage of digital implant planning is that it’s digital.
Although this might sound completely ridiculous and developing disadvantages of analogue planning will soon be washed away by having things stored digitally.
Advantages include - not losing your models, not losing your guides after surgery for medical legal reasons and also the stamping of your planning process from a consent point of view.
It also includes the fact that there is no inaccuracy in this system following first collection which is not the case for analogue and also it’s just better and more accurate and more visual for patients and let’s you see more of the problems before you have them.
The main advantage of digital implant planning is that it’s entirely restorative driven if done properly (and that’s coming from a surgeon).
For 25 years we’ve been talking about restorative based implant planning but proper digital implant planning ensures that things come from the restorative aspect and also shows you there’s nowhere to hide when you do it that way.
One of the other great advantages of digital implant planning is it will allow people to learn how to place implants properly doing less implants.
This might sound ridiculous but in the good old days of the ‘wild west’ we just placed hundreds and hundreds and thousands of implants and finally got the hang of it.
The guys who are developing now from the early stages of straightforward implant dentistry do not have that privilege and will never see the amount of implants that some of the old guard have seen and therefore need to be able to learn in a different way.
Digital implant planning allows you to plan, review, do and review again. It allows you to ‘measure twice and cut once’ and it allows you to go back and look to see what went well and what didn’t.
The companies will tell you that it’s cheaper (it will be but not yet), the companies will tell you that it’s faster (all added up it isn’t), the companies will tell you it’s easier (it isn’t), what it is; is more precise and more detailed and more considered and more accurate with almost certainly better outcomes for the patients in the long-term.
You haven’t missed the boat on this, not by a long way. You can drop into digital implant planning without even buying any hardware (this was part of my lecture on Thursday night).
If you haven’t got to it though, it’s time to talk to people and go and visit guys that are using it on a day-to-day basis to see the advantages for you.
Blog Post Number - 2532