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It’s five years

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 21/07/18 18:00
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Why does it take five years to become an implant surgeon who is capable in straightforward implant dentistry and working with some confidence into advanced implant dentistry (but not ready for complex)?

It takes five years (from a standing start) because there are certain things that people who come on a course don’t know and don’t know they don’t know,

  1. Dentists who have limited or little experience in surgery do not know how to raise a flap or even give the local required to raise a flap. That is just a fact based on 25 years of teaching people how to do surgical extractions. There’s no way you would know how to do this unless you’d been shown how to do it and practised.
  2. Dentists who come on courses such as this (from a standing start) do not know how or what to suture with.
  3. Dentists who come on courses like this (from a standing start) don’t understand how to set up a surgery, or how to teach their nurse to set up a surgery or retract or adopt principles of surgical sterility within a dental practice. That takes time and effort and practice and teaching.
  4. Dentists who come on courses such as this do not know where to put an implant (or even how to put it in) and certainly don’t know what to do when they open something up and can’t put it in the place they wanted.
  5. They don’t know what to do when things go wrong.
  6. Frighteningly, the don’t know when to stop surgery once they start.
  7. They don’t know how to speak to patients about this, they don’t know how to get out of trouble and the often don’t realise they are in trouble in the first place before it gets really bad.

 I have taught people to perform surgical extractions in Oral Surgery for 25 years.

I have mentored people in implant dentistry for 15 years and I have seen a lot of people start out in their careers.

I have watched some guys smash it to bits and become fantastic implant surgeons from a standing start and I’ve watched others, who feel entitled because they paid for a course, be absolutely awful and continue to do awful things until disasters happen.

As I’ve said many times in these pages before, if you’re not entirely comfortable doing an upper anterior apicectomy close to the floor of the nose with piezo surgery, magnification and an aesthetic incision, why would you ever be any good at placing an implant in the upper anterior region and why would you have the skills to do that?

There’s no such thing as talent, there’s only purposeful practice and reflection.

That’s why it takes five years.

 

Blog Post Number: 1710

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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