In the first half of 2017 I was hugely privileged to present twice at the digital symposium in London, once on the Friday evening and then on the Saturday morning.
The work that went into production of that presentation (which was a recorded guided surgery case and all of the evidence and technique related to that) was extraordinary and one of the times where I put the most work into a lecture that I have provided ever.
I don’t really know what the feedback was for that but from my point of view I was really happy with what we’d managed to achieve.
Following on from that conference though I watched digital dentistry start to run riot through the profession, fuelled by large corporation’s urge to grab market share as fast as possible.
At that point, as a business, we stepped back from the ‘limelight’ to let the pigs wrestle in s**t.
That’s always a tough call because you get engulfed by FOMO (fear of missing out) and watch people say things and do things that you think are wrong and think you should be involved in. But the sensible thing, and the way to act with integrity is to sit back for a bit.
I was massively privileged though to have a conversation with someone really senior in the corporate world of digital dentistry recently who trusts me enough to have an honest conversation.
The decisions around the expansions of digital dentistry and the sales strategy from a corporate perspective are nothing to do with patient benefit, and nothing really to do with dentist benefit either.
The truth is that they don’t make a great deal of money from shifting the heavy metal objects and there has to be significant levels of planned obsolescence associated with these objects so you have to buy another one relatively soon after.
There is no incentive for these businesses to promote adoption of the product, so to make sure for example that you nail your principles for guided surgery to the best benefit of your patients and therefore win in the long term.
That just costs money off the already shrinking profit margin and therefore won’t look good on the next quarter’s figures.
To me this is entirely at odds to what we have to do with this phenomenal new technology where we have to promote education and adoption, ethically and honestly for the benefit, not only of patients but also the practitioners (customers) who buy the product. Sadly, this is entirely at odds with the financial pressures that these companies find themselves under in what is a brutal and competitive market.
So, the prices will be driven down for digital technology in the race to the bottom and it looks pretty much like it will be commoditised and you’ll be able to buy directly online, without speaking to a human, your intraoral scanner or even your CBCT machine.
Some guys will train you a bit, some guys not (if you choose to avoid the training you get the product cheaper) and away you go with an extraordinary piece of technology you don’t really know how to use or when to use and you have to ‘teach yourself how to play the guitar’
It’s funny because I have a suspicion that for experienced practitioners, guided implant placement will not improve their outcomes and I have a small study running which may well prove that over the next couple of years.
For inexperienced practitioners I think it’s a different story, but that’s because everybody misses the point and the benefits of guided surgery and digital planning and execution in implant dentistry.
To this end, we’ve started the process (and it’s a long and arduous process) of designing TCA Digital Implant Dentistry Course.
It has a single introductory day for people who are uninitiated to this topic, where they can come without any embarrassment or shame and find out the basics and then it will have three days of the surgical aspect of digital implant dentistry.
Later there would be three days of digital restorative implant dentistry and you’d be able to chunk it into pieces and only do the intro day or the surgery stuff or the restorative stuff or all of it.
This will be launching sometime next year when we get it finalised so it’s not that I’ve not been doing anything since the digital symposium in 2017, I’ve just not been posting the odd case on Facebook to encourage you to adopt techniques in digital dentistry which actually, might not work in the long term.
Blog Post Number: 1821
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