I have developed the perfect course and the syllabus and the aims and objectives are listed below. If you’d like to sign up it’s £5. Details of how to do so will be published later.
Course Title: Everything you need to know about dentistry and dental practice to make you into a multi-millionaire, be brilliant and gorgeous.
Aim: See title
Syllabus: Everything related to the title
Duration of the course: One Friday afternoon in July
Venue of the course: Multiple venues around the UK
Fee to include: education on everything you ever needed to know about being absolutely brilliant in everything, therefore allowing you to do whatever you want and to come out and be happy and handsome and wealthy.
So, it seems to me has the education in dentistry developed into.
I received an email from Hong Kong this weekend (honestly, from Hong Kong) sending me the course content for somebody else’s year implant course.
This was from somebody who knows about dental education and who was asking whether it was actually possible at all to fit even 50% of the advertised course content into the course.
We’ve now reached a stage where the ‘features and benefits’ battle (and features and benefits is a long-term, decades old proven system for selling things to people) is in full effect.
If your course teaches implant placement then my course teaches implant placement and zygomatic implant placement.
If your course teaches GBR then my course teaches GBR and sinus grafting.
If your course teaches staged implants and your course teaches immediate implants then my course teaches staged, immediate and unicorn implants (I don’t even know what they are)
If your course has 15 days then my course has 30 days.
If your course has a trip to the Olympic stadium in Berlin then my course lets you be one of the first dentists to carry out dental implant treatment in space.
At some point this model has to break because there is only so much you can learn in one go and certainly only so much you can apply in one go.
It may be a false safety net that makes you think that the more it says on the syllabus the better you’ll be at the end and the less likely it is you’ll be executed when it goes wrong.
But it doesn’t work that way.
If you look at anybody you know in dentistry who is any good at the practical aspect, and I could reel off a few here but there isn’t really any point in that, I bet you they all took years to get to the situation they’re in and I bet they’ve got hundreds or thousands of hours of purposeful practice and a log book the size of your leg.
For the record, it’s worth stating that I consider myself to be a capable practitioner in my subject but not exceptional and here’s the purposeful practice at a glance that applies to my CV.
3,000 surgical lower third molar removals
Over 5,000 dental implants placed
Over 1,500 GBR procedures and 500 sinus graft procedures
Over 10,000 surgical extractions
I didn’t learn to do that in a year and I haven’t finished learning how to do it yet. We have the capability and the ability on our courses to teach anything at any level of complexity in implant dentistry but to do that to people who start out in implant dentistry is to kill them and finish them off before they’ve started.
It was fantastic last week on the first two days of our year course (which I’m delighted to say is sold out) but only one person had placed implants before and that person had only placed 10.
What a wonderful starting point to go from for a group of practitioners who were clearly interested in looking after their patients to the best of their ability and who also seem to understand that they’re at the start of a journey which doesn’t end in October this year when the year one course finishes – it probably starts then.
Blog Post Number: 1906