Over the years, in my time in surgery (31 now) I've watched as different things have come and gone and other things have come and stayed.
I watched in the early stages of my implant career, how people argued over the type of surfaces that implants had. Whether they should be smooth or whether they should be rough. I watched about how people fought and argued about whether you should cement a crown or screw it in.
I watched how people argue over implant design. Watched how people argue over materials.
Things emerge. People discuss. Things stick.
Implant dentistry gets better and then we move along. There's another fashionable subject that hits the treadmill and people grab onto it.
The trend towards immediate implants or immediate restoration of implants.
There's one such thing.
But nowadays, one of the things that people are most interested in, is how to make the gum around an implant look like it's the gum around the tooth.
This has been a thing for a long time. But now people understand that mastering the soft tissue around implants, both in the planning of cases and in the execution of cases, particularly with using grafting and soft tissue, both connective tissue and epithelial tissue, is one of the fundamental skills to move on to advanced and complex implant dentistry.
We've known this for a long time, and I've taught it in different versions in different ways.
But over the past few years, we've developed a course with our periodontist Raj Nansi, (formerly the president of the British Society of Periodontology and Implantology) for soft tissue and implant dentistry.
Raj's course is fantastic in its simplicity, because it just goes through all the details of what's important and the fundamental basics of soft tissue and teaches people how to provide connective tissue grafts and epithelial graphs both from the patient and from a packet.
It's definitely the type of thing that very few people in implant dentistry have actually formally done and it's definitely the type of thing that everybody in implant dentistry needs to do and learn.
It may be fashionable for the moment, but that's only before it becomes established as a fundamental basis of learning and implant dentistry, particularly past straightforward cases.
If you're interested in attending and finding out in a non-threatening environment how to do this and how to master it, then the course details are here.https://www.campbellacademy.co.uk/soft-tissue-grafting-workshop-around-dental-implants . And there are a limited places on this course (as there are in all of our courses). So let us know and come and see us.
The course itself is a mixture of debate and discussion, presentation, and hands on practicals to cement your knowledge.
Look forward to seeing you there.
Blog Post Number - 4829