The Campbell Academy Blog (69)

Tomorrow's world today

It seemed like just a few minutes ago when I was arguing with consultant orthodontists about the ability for clearer aligners to move teeth in a way that patients desired.

It seemed, at the same time, as I was suggesting to people that we could use a CEREC machine to mill surgical guides to position implants correctly, and they looked at me like I was some gone-out weirdo.

It seems like I did that only a few minutes ago, but this week I have a call with guys from Switzerland who want us to pilot printing aligners in practice for patients on an at-need basis through Straumann (one of the biggest dental corporates in the world).

It seems like all the time now, tomorrow's world happens today.

Some years ago (actually in 2018, on a plane to China), I wrote the DID Course (digital implant dentistry).

We put together a three-day course to teach people how to do guided surgery.

We showed them how to use the software and assess the patients, the pros, the cons, the good, and the bad, all with some high-level clinical guys who were presenting with us in the clinic.

It gave guys a chance to bring a patient of their own and provide surgery for them under guided conditions with some help to get them going.

Nobody wanted to come.

In the end, in 2018, we had one sign-up for that course (it was all completely ready to go).

People jumped on to Blue Sky Bio because it was free, and they used that software to design things themselves (even though they'd never been shown how to do it or by anyone who'd made mistakes before).

And so, they did some online webinars, or they looked at online courses, or maybe they read a magazine article or watched a YouTube video, but they never got any depth. Therefore they never took their guided surgery to any other level.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from someone enormously high-ranking in the ITI (the organisation I'm working with in education) in a panic that we didn't have any guided surgery teaching or digital planning as part of our online education portfolio.

The fact is, in 2018, 2019, and 2020 people didn't want that.

They wanted to teach themselves how to play the guitar.

Since then, enough people have begun to realise that the insight that you can obtain from people who've done something many more times than you and made an arsehole of it many more times than you are actually more valuable than the free YouTube video you watch in between the adverts.

It is pretty clear that tomorrow's world is here.

What is not entirely clear is that we're going to be in a position to teach ourselves thoroughly how to do it without anybody else's assistance.