The principle of guided implant surgery has been around for quite a long time.
If you're a part of the Straumann universe, it was possible to take CT scans and analogue casts and work together, trying to fabricate guided surgery guides back in the early 2000s. There's a specific piece of equipment that you use called a Gonex Table to basically survey your analogue casts.
For our journey, the guided journey started in 2009; I then kicked forward even harder than that in 2013/14, where we traded in our Carestream CBCT and upgraded to a Sirona CBCT together with a full CEREC setup and a 5-axis milling machine.
We were the first people in the United Kingdom to use CEREC Guide 2 (the ability to build your own single-unit surgical guide and your CEREC machine). We used an array of guided surgery protocols and procedures, and I presented for two consecutive years at the digital symposium in London organised by Henry Schein in what were the early days of guided surgery.
As always with these things, I thought I was behind; looking back, 12 years ago, we were definitely ahead.
With that in mind, and after we'd been running these protocols for a few years, I got to travel to China with Geitlisch, the biomaterials company, on a tour that had nothing to do with guided surgery.
I was speaking in 5 cities in 5 days, and it was, in fact, the first time I ever turned left on an aeroplane and flew business class and first class for the second legs of my flight.
It was a huge voyage of discovery, 5 cities in 5 days, the whole Chinese culture, speaking with simultaneous translation, all that type of stuff.
During that trip though, because I was flying 18 hours each way, I decided to take the most extraordinary piece of equipment that I'd come across for project planning, which is Seth Godin's project planning book.
It is a little scribble book that you buy for each time you plan something, and it prompts you in different ways to think about things differently and to think about your plan. I completed it throughout that trip to and from China, designing what I call the D.I.D course (Digital Implant Dentistry Course).
This was a 3-day live skills course where delegates would attend on day one to learn everything about digital planning for implant dentistry and guided surgery.
On day 2, they would plan and design their own case and do model surgery, and on day 3, their patient would arrive, and they would do the surgery on that patient on the guide that they had designed and milled/printed in the practice.
We ran this course up and got it ready for working in 2019 and launched it, and not a single person booked on.
This is by far and away not the first time that something like this has happened to me, and I was really disappointed as we had some extraordinary speakers booked, extraordinary facilities, and all the logistics to provide this course. It was the opportunity for people to really kick forward in guided surgery, but the market just was not ready for it.
That didn't stop us pioneering stuff in guided surgery and moving forwards. We were the first practice in Britain to have the Straumann Falcon unit, which is effectively the closest you'll get to robotic guided surgery in Europe.
But following on and wanting to learn more and go deeper into this, I decided 2 years ago to travel to Gdansk in Poland to work with Maya Chmielewska and Chris Chmielewski (her dad), who are a couple of the best dentists in the world and people who sit at the very top of the pyramid in guided surgery and digital planning.
I took Dominic Smithers with us, who was then our TCC fellow, and we both went for 3 days of guided surgery planning courses on co-diagnostic (the Straumann platform) with Chris and Maya.
That course is utterly transformational, but the truth is that I went on that course to introduce Dom, not me, because I'm over the hill on the other side of my career, but Dom is just ramping things up.
When we came back from the course, I gave Dom the book that I'd used to design the D.I.D course back in 2018, and asked him if he wanted to design his own course around the principles that we had then and the knowledge that we have now.
Dom has become a wizard in this type of digital planning and guided surgery, and it's absolutely appropriate for someone of his age and someone of his stage, and how we learn implant dentistry moving forwards and how we adopt the technologies that are available for us.
And so later this year on the 8th and 9th of October, Dom will present the guided surgery and digital treatment planning course at The Campbell Academy.
This is a team effort of intellectual property, but it is directed and hosted by Dom; it will take you through the principles of guided surgery and digital planning, and it will give you a gift that you'll be able to use on every single implant case for the rest of your life. The lifetime value of this course is quite extraordinary.
You can teach yourself how to play the guitar, and that might work and take you to a level, or you can be taught how to play the guitar and then get better and better.
It started on a plane in 2018; it will have taken 8 years to come to life, but it has been worth the wait.
Blog Post Number - 4576