This little piece of writing forms part two of the guide to getting into implant dentistry for any practitioner who is, well, thinking of getting into implant dentistry.
In the first part of the introduction, I briefly explained my journey and some of the interesting things about your journey or how that might pan out if you're considering this.
Before I get much further into this, about how to choose someone to help you do that, I think first of all, you must understand a little bit more about the investment you need to make in terms of time and emotion and effort and energy into becoming an implant practitioner or at least an implant practitioner of any quality.
I use a slide in one of my presentations when talking to newly qualified dentists, which I've used for many years. It represents an estimation of my income through the first five years of my practising life when I started as a house Officer at Glasgow Dental Hospital and School when most of my friends went into practice to do VT (DFT).
At the end of five years, after I had spent my time as a house officer and then two years as a senior house officer, followed by a year as a VT, after the wages for VT had gone down and then finally entered my first year as an associate, I was at least £130,000 down on my friends who'd gone straight into practice.
That's a lot of money now, but my god, it was a lot of money then. It spanned the timeline from 1994 to 1999 and, in today's numbers, will almost certainly be worth something in the region of £250,000.
The other part was that I had spent an extraordinary amount more time at work than my friends and colleagues.
Sometimes, I was at work for 120 hours in a week (that's not a joke) at the time when they were barely doing 40 hours a week, and so I was sometimes spending three times more time at work for a lot less money than they were.
It's worked out great in the end for me, but the thing about this is that you're choosing a long-term journey, you'll never get this done quickly, and you'll never get it done cheaply (at least what you get cheaply will be totally different from that, which you invest in properly).
With this in mind, it's very important that you choose a provider who suits you, what your vision is, and what you're trying to achieve over the next five, 10 or 20 years of your career.
It may be attractive to go for something free or to travel to another country and place implants into very poor people, who are being paid a very small amount of money for you to make an arse of the inside of their mouth, but that shouldn't really sit well with your values about what you're trying to achieve.
As I suggested in the previous blog, you can try to be good or you can try to be rich, but it's tough to try to learn to be both at the same time.
For that reason, I would suggest you investigate carefully which implant system you wish to invest your life in because although it is possible to switch and change, that now becomes more and more complex and more and more traumatic as we move forward because the learning of a new system now takes so much time and effort that it's almost unattainable.
The other thing you can do with this is what we should do with anything, ask.
I would ask other friends, colleagues, and people you know which providers they used and ask them for a recommendation.
Word-of-mouth recommendation from people like us is one of the best ways to generate business and one of the best ways to find quality providers, but also ask the provider themselves.
Draw up a list of questions about what you would like to achieve over the next 5 to 10 years, and ask whether your provider can help to guide you through that.
Maybe that would involve which level of complexity you seek to achieve.
Maybe that would involve how much mentoring or assistance you seek to get.
Maybe that would involve the type of people that teach on your chosen course, the system that they're using or the philosophy that they wish to instil.
They all should have the answers to that straight away, right in.
Maybe they're trying to help you to get rich as quickly as possible.
Maybe they're trying to get you to keep your costs down as much as possible.
Maybe they're trying to help you become the best you can be.
All of these things are different products, and all of these things come with advantages and disadvantages.
Like the questions that we always tell the patients that they should ask:
How many implants have they done?
How many have worked?
What can go wrong?
What provider are they using, and what is the guarantee?
Why not ask your possible implant education provider the same questions?
Blog Post Number - 3664
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