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One of the highlights of this week was a skype call with a professor at one of the most well known dental university institutions in Europe.

This university professor is interested in doing some collaborative research with a practice that is prepared to invest in testing it’s outcome and working with an academic partner. For some bizarre reason and by hook or by crook one of the partners they’ve chosen is us.

From the very early stages of implanting digital dentistry into our practice one of the key objectives was to validate what we were doing and to make sure it was in fact beneficial to the patient going forwards; to invest in this technology and ultimately to charge it out to them.

That is not to mention the time involved in digital planning in implant dentistry and the heartbreaks, bumps and catastrophes along the way that come with trying to implement new technology into a steady analogue work flow.

The fascinating thing about the conversation with the professor from the university in Europe though was not how they look down their noses at us and told us what we would do and how we would become a small hair on the tail of the wagging dog.

It was an understanding and an appreciation of how difficult it is to produce this type of research from a university setting let alone from a practice setting.

The first 18 months of the research project in the practice has been about battering down doors and pushing roadblocks out of the way as much as humanly possible. We have had rejection after rejection in terms of gaining ethical approval (now obtained) and publication of material – still not secured.

The most sinister and (blackly) funny event that has happened so far is having a quality research paper in implant maintenance rejected from an international journal on the basis of the fact that ‘it was submitted by a private practice in the UK’.

Sad as this may seem as an indictment to UK dentistry this is what we’re up against.

The skype conference call that I was part of today reinvigorated our belief that what we’re doing is right because the people we were speaking to thought we were right.

That is enough for me to push this project on even further, it’s already showing huge benefits in the stuff that we produce for the Academy, for validation for our patients and to the success of the treatments that we pursue.

It will go right through the practice through a whole host of practice protocols that are research based and tested by us.

The real fruits of this will not be available to me, at least for another 10 years, but when they come they’ll be fantastic.

Blog post number: 1457