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Just a Little bit of Madness

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 20/11/17 18:00
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It’s not often I take the time to flick through ‘leaflet drop’ catalogues that come through the door but one just fell out the other day and I was intrigued by what I saw on the front cover, probably because it was related to implant dentistry.

Without naming names or upsetting anybody (I hope) there was a well known dental supplier company promoting a new type of dental implant. It appeared to be a fusion of all aspects of dental implants in one implant and coloured black and gold. Black on the roughened surface and gold on the mucosal surface. The implant also had a lifetime warranty although it’s not exactly clear on what that means.

The fixture in question is a combination of titanium (well established in implant dentistry) and zirconium ceramic (less well established).

I was under the impression that use of ceramic implants was for two reasons, one, they can be white which can be seen as an advantage (although not an advantage as far as I can see) and number two, they can be used for people who have some sort of eversion to metal being placed in their bodies.

This new product it seems is a fusion of both of these things solving neither problem above as far as I can tell e.g. the implant is not white and contains metal.

I know that I am renowned for being a cynic but it seems to me that the implant is this colour because it’s ‘sexy’ and may well be a sales tool. Interestingly though on the advert also the page with the prices had emblazoned upon the bottom ‘from only £16.29 each’ this was in fact in relation to components of implants and not the implants themselves.

I don’t blame in any way the supply company that produced this because it’s clearly effective and clearly sells stuff otherwise they wouldn’t continue to do it (or am I once again being naive). We must discount these things entirely and continue to tread the line of evidence based practice and explain to patients (as is our duty and our role as a advocate) that new products on the market which seem to sound good may not solve a problem or in fact may be designed to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Dental implants do not need to be gold in colour nor do they need to be black, or made of ceramic material.

They need to be researched based, proven to work and proven to last a long period of time.

It seems for a section of the profession this is no longer good enough and the provision of healthcare must move on to things which while not necessarily be proven to be clinical effective, look really good. As I’ve said recently in these pages and as I will be saying more frequently going forwards, we really have to choose whether we would like to be a profession or whether we would like to be retailors.

 

Blog post number: 1468

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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