It’s been busy since I went back to work after 6th February and I’ve been in too many places doing too many different things. Always guilty of ‘walking down the same street without making the changes I’m supposed to make’ but I’ll continue to try my best. During that time I left the Facebook banner on my Facebook page, which said I was still on sabbatical until the end of February. That is being changed now for something different, which will be reflected in this blog.
In this rushed time that I came back I was all over the country, speaking to different people on invitation about different subjects but quite a few times about sinus grafting and presenting the results that we have in the practice for 9 years worth of sinus grafting with 331 dental implants and an exceptional survival rate over a technique which will reduce patient treatment times down from 6 months to 6 weeks.
This is now a concept which is proven in research (albeit a service evaluation) and is now something which is reproducible by others which is the essence of research. So then I made the mistake of checking Facebook (our Academy page is still on there and some people communicate via that) Following one of my lectures I had a message from someone at an implant supply company. There are several things wrong with this:
First was the nature of contacting me through Facebook - and this is not a direct dig at the individual involved but a general conceptual observation – you contact someone through Facebook because you think you will get a reply. Somehow people have accelerated the importance of Facebook messaging above emails (probably because it’s different) and phone messages to the practice. Were someone to contact the practice by phone to say “I saw your lecture, why don’t you use these implants instead?” I wouldn’t reply. That happens quite a lot. Were they to email me with a spam email with the same content, I wouldn’t reply. But there is an interruption premium through the Facebook channel which makes you feel guilty for not replying to Facebook messages… I didn’t reply.
The second the problem with the message was that it suggested that what I was using for the implants that I presented was wrong and that I could get much better results with an implant designed by this company and they would give me a couple of implants to try to prove that point. There is so much wrong with this that it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s have a couple of goes on patients with implants I have never used before because I got them for free. We can try them out on real people and if they don’t work then what the hey? I should do this because someone who earns a living selling these implants tells me they’re better than what I’m using already.
If I hadn’t been in this business for 20 years or more and hadn’t seen this happen a gazillion times perhaps I would have been swayed by this.
Here’s how this conversation actually goes… “Dear Dr Elvis, we believe we have designed a product which fits with your treatment protocols but will massively benefit patients because of X. We would very much like to trial this product in patients and feel you may be the best clinician to provide that assistance for us. We would like to discuss with you the possibility of doing that so we may demonstrate that the product is of huge benefit to patients and therefore push it out to a wider market”
This is entirely at odds with… “Dear Dr Elvis, Here’s a couple of freebies that you can try on your patients in the hope you might find they’re cheaper and you’ll change system to this despite the fact that it has limited research associated with it”
Read the above and take your pick. Two messages here. Do not let random supply companies that you’ve never worked with before play on your conscience with messages which pretend that they need immediate reply. Take free products from competitors with a pinch of salt. Remember the old adage of ‘it must be clinically proven to be better or must be clinically proven to be exactly the same and cheaper’ and don’t change for any other reason.
Blog Post Number: 1224
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