The Campbell Academy Blog (72)

A short series on getting started in implant dentistry: Part 5 - Collaboration

In this series of blogs about getting started in implant dentistry, I told a story of where I came from and then tried to give some insights into the investment required to do this properly and some heads up about the surgical and restorative aspects.

But one of the other (and in my mind) main benefits of being involved in an implant dentistry community is the community itself, the collaboration that goes on, and the friendships that are built.

Some of my best friends from the second part of my life after I left university have come from my career in implant dentistry.

I have met some of the very best people you could possibly meet, some of whom I have even become proud to call my friends who I can work with, develop and grow with and share the highs and the lows, the triumphs and the disasters.

That has made my career way richer than it would ever have been if I had never been involved in implant dentistry, and it is, in fact, one of the greatest privileges I have in my work.

This year, I was invited to apply for a job with the International Team for Implantology, the not-for-profit foundation I have been involved with in the United Kingdom and Ireland for over 20 years.

The job was an international position as Editor in Chief of the ITI Academy, which provides online learning in implant dentistry to 100 countries worldwide.

In the interview for that job, I was asked why I had applied and why I would want to do it (it's essentially unpaid). I explained that implant dentistry had given me more than I could ever have imagined, and I'd found myself in my early fifties in a position both financially and spiritually from a position of friendships and relationships I'd built that I could never have dreamed possible as a younger man.

I said that the ITI was a huge part of that, and I felt it was only appropriate that I should give back to the ITI whatever I could to make it better if it were possible for me to do that, but also just to repay some of the debt that I have.

This is an example of what implant dentistry in a community of individuals with shared values can do.

It's at least worth the value of training in implant dentistry to get the joy of the relationships you build, forgetting what this does on a monetary basis for your practice or the interest to your practising career or the enhancement to your team and your practising environment overall.

I would encourage anyone to start to become involved in implant dentistry to try the restorative aspects of this, to bring benefits to the patients and to see how it sparks interest in another field of dentistry, which is hugely and wonderfully rewarding in every way.

Whenever I speak to DFTs, the subject often comes up of what I would have done if I hadn't been a dentist, and so I would have loved to have been a professional basketball player when I was a boy, but honestly, I couldn't imagine anything being better (perhaps apart from basketball) than the job I have now, and implant dentistry gave that to me.

That is some testament to someone who has been in dentistry, including my university years, for 35 years, and I still have no sign of stopping any time soon.

If you're interested in inspiring and sparking a career like that, look at implant dentistry as a possible option; it will feed you for the rest of your working days in every way possible.