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It was a Tuesday morning, around half past 11, I was sitting in my office at home.

I never use my office at home, but I had to on Tuesday, because Julie and Sharon were here cleaning the house.

Julie has helped with our house for years and up until recently, also helped us clean the practice, but she has given that up because it was became a little bit too much.

I’m still a little bit ashamed at the fact that someone else comes in to help us clean the house, so I hide away in the office if I have to be here, which is why I am in here today.

I was supposed to be on my bike, training for a couple of events that I have got coming up, but as always the case is at the moment the lure of the magnet of work that sucks me away from training and I have any excuse not to hurt myself on a bike.

But anyway, to the watershed moment that happened about 5 minutes ago, that made me pick up the Dictaphone, to put down in a blog, what had just happened.

Some where about 6 or 7 years ago, I fancied the idea of being a minor researcher in dental practice until I was to count some of the stuff that we did and to push it out to make it better, for other people if we were getting anything right.

We started with various little projects, but the most important one was the “aesthetic study” where we tried to emulate what we had done at the university of Bern, by Daniel Buser and Vivianne Chappuis.

We were never, ever likely to get anywhere close to the complexity and organisation of the project that they have now published results for over 10 years, where at least we could try, get it wrong, perhaps modify it and try again.

So, I tried and got it wrong and modified it and I’m trying again.

But since the time that I started that, the business has changed and moved, the organisation that we have is entirely different, because we started it, made mistakes and then tried again.

So, I’m in the office, initially going through my emails, which is now, one of the biggest jobs in the world, because I don’t seem to get sent emails that don’t create an enormous amount of work, but I am downloading presentations from drop box of the 5 year reviews of some of the cases that have been put together by Nish at the practice.

We started off with about 20 patients and run our dentist somewhere in the region of 14 for one reason or another, but that is still a reasonable cohort for a study like this and a practice like ours. We have tones of stuff that we can do with this data and we are using it quite cleverly and the least interestingly and interesting for me. But I downloaded one patients who was a young woman that I treated about 6 or 7 years ago for treatment of a messing up an essential incisor.

I’ve got to say to her that I cannot remember the details of the clinical case, which is most unlikely, but in any event I was scrutinizing it on a key note presentation on a full screen in front of me with Nish’s amazing photographs and I wasn’t 100% happy with the result, of her upper right central incisor gingival margin.

I went into my cloud based clinical notes system, that I can now access from home really easily, only to realise that we had replaced the upper left central incisor.

I couldn’t tell which tooth it was, and I had done it.

Please don’t get me wrong, this is not a humble brag, it’s not perfect, the reasons why I couldn’t tell the difference, was because they had actually just been cleaned by the hygienist and there was a bit of inflammation around the gingival margin or the upper right central incisor.

But the watershed is here.

I’d hoped to get to the stage where we had a team of people working together to try and make it better and we have.

I hope to get to the stage where I get to produce things to show people how they could do it this way and it would make it better, and we have.

I never set out to teach exceptional clinicians, because I am certainly not an exceptional clinician myself.

I set out to show people that there are systems that you can use, to try and get it good, most of the time and if you choose to go off those systems, that is ok, but those systems do work.

I was convinced therefore by Tom (and Andy) that the first course we should do at the new Campbell Academy facility should be a masterclass on Aesthetic implant dentistry and I should provide it.

This is different to the aesthetic course that we do in November, which is an introduction for people that enter the advanced nature of aesthetic anterior implant dentistry.

This is a step further, dealing with the details and the semantics and the type of course where you can dial in to real, daft detail at a deep level to make it better.

So, when on the 31^st January for the first time ever and with extraordinary trepidation, I will provide a masterclass in my own teaching facility in my own teaching business.

I’d love you to come and talk to us about this, to shout at me or to criticise me or to tell me that I am wrong, because I’m not using material that’s promoted by somebody else who owns it and tells me that its easier and it lasts for longer.

I’d love to show you, in depth, the stuff that we’ve done over the past 7/8 years that has allowed me to sit in my office one morning at 11:30, not being able to tell the difference between which tooth was done.

I’ve made a note to myself, to start the master class with that slide that I’ve just looked at and I hope I remember.

If you fancy a day, deep in aesthetic implant dentistry in the new facility with a group of 20 people, hit reply and say yes and I will put you on the list.

Blog Post Number - 2058