Over the past few years of my clinical practice I feel I have been bombarded with the opportunity to alter techniques, materials, systems and protocols to try and improve.
I think I have reached a stage where if I try to change anything else I will never know where I started and I will never know whether things are any different.
I know this is the province of Governments to alter the structure of the Health Service or Education so that in 4 years time they can alter it again and it’s difficult to compare with what happened before. The perennial urge for changing something for changes sake.
From my point of view there is a point at which this becomes destructive and merely distracts your attention from trying to get the best results from the systems you are already using. Today that happened in a conversation with Geistlich Bio Materials.
I have a long standing relationship with Geistlich Bio Materials since 1998, I have used their products for that length of time and as far as I am concerned they are tried and tested with very little in the market that provides a better alternative.
It was interesting to note that recently Geistlich celebrated their 1000th publication into the use and clinical applications of their materials. 30 years of Bio-Oss and 20 years of Bio-Gide with over 10 million patient experiences.
This is not a plug for Geistlich Bio Materials at all, it’s just an example of a business which is playing the long game, trying to promote it’s product, not changing at every opportunity and trying to provide long term data on something that is successful and predictable.
You may wish to chase other options, you may wish to go cheaper but there is an old adage that I have written in these pages before by Andre Schroeder the Founder of the ITI and developer of the ITI dental implant system on changing a product, you can read that here.
Final note: it is easy to think that what the patient is buying in a dental implant service is the dental implant and materials but that is not the case. That is a tiny proportion of what the patient is buying and the major proportion of what the patient is buying is the expertise of the clinician. If you have entered into a war with neighbouring practices of selling dental implants then you’re in the wrong game. Exit that war and re-enter the war of selling expertise, at that stage the cost of bio materials and implants becomes increasingly less significant.
Leave a comment