I was working in my office today on a Monday at work (unusual for me cos I'm not always here, often at home on a Monday).
Lots of different things to do, bits and bobs, some calls with the ITI and some project stuff, also mentoring for Faith, placing one of the implants in an early part of her career.
In the middle of this, I got a Slack message from Beatriz Sanchez.
Super Bea has been with us well over 10 years now, and it's now 10 years further on from where Faith, whom I'm mentoring this afternoon for her implant, was at that stage.
Bea is now an ITI Fellow, an international speaker, and a surgeon of some note and accomplishment.
In the early parts of her career, she was raised ‘the Colin Campbell way’, but as everyone does and should, she splits off to be her own personality and her own clinician; she sent me pictures of two patients that she's seen in clinic today for one reason or another.
The first one was a beautiful game of ‘guess the implant Colin Campbell placed 12/13 years ago’.
I saw the picture, which was upper left of a patient with really good oral hygiene, but a heavily restored dentition, and it was clear that it was the upper left 4 and 5 which were the implants because there was some tissue repaired with pink porcelain in that area.
Still looked pretty good though.
The punchline, of course, was that it was upper left 3, 4, and 5, and the 3 looked exactly like it was the patient's own tooth, and the 4 and 5 were part of a bridge where tissue had been lost.
The second one was even more straightforward: it was a lower left 3-unit bridge, but with perfect soft tissue conditions and massive stability over a long period of time.
I know how to place these implants, and I know what design they were, and we're moving into a world now where those designs are gone, and that procedure is almost done.
People want to be super fast all the time; in fact, in the call that I had at lunchtime today, Straumann, our strategic partner in the ITI want us to now teach 4 different pathways.
Number 1, fast molar,
Number 2, fast anterior,
Number 3, fast fixed,
and number 4, removable.
Everything's fast.
The thing about the way I did it 13 years ago is that it works.
These are not two isolated cases.
This interaction with Bea now happens so often that I've forgotten how to count.
That is not to say that I don't have problems or issues with things that we did before, but now all the time I see patients coming through with 13, 15, even 20-year restorations, which are stable and healthy and good.
This is the advantage of practising in the same place for the same amount of time, looking after effectively the same community.
Will this be the same for people who are much less experienced at this stage doing much more complex procedures?
The thing about 13 years ago is that it was 2013, and at that stage I'd been placing implants for 15 years, and I was comfortable with what worked, the protocols, the designs, and things weren't changing that quickly.
Since that time, we have accelerated for reasons that I'm not quite sure I understand entirely, but that everybody seemed to think it's better.
Just to be clear, faster is not necessarily better when you're trying to build things for decades.
Ps Maybe it is time to let the old ways die, but just as a reminder of something beautiful with that phrase, here's a YouTube video.
Blog Post Number - 4609