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It’s a big week for us this week.

On Friday, tomorrow, I am speaking at the Digital Symposium with my super CDT and great friend Mark Melbourne.

We have rushed down to London this afternoon and doing two sessions at the Digital Symposium on bar stool coaching.

This is a question and answer session on everything that has gone wrong (and sometimes right) for us in digital dentistry in the last 4 years.

We won’t be lecturing at anybody, we will be talking to and answering any questions with anybody who cares to turn up.

It might be that there is no one in the room, it might be that there are lots (I doubt there will be lots) but come and see us if you want, if only to check out our matching t-shirts.

At the same time, and just across town at the ITI congress tomorrow we will be presenting two of our research posters. Kath our Research Coordinator will be presenting our poster on Implant Maintenance in Primary Care and going through the numbers that we have in the practice, portraying that pre-implant maintenance makes a massive difference to the outcomes of implants over time.

It also, incidentally shows the incidents (extremely small) of peri implant disease in our practice. This is completely at odds with some of the numbers in place elsewhere and I suspect it’s because the maintenance isn’t good enough.

Across the room Nish will be presenting our 10-year sinus numbers.

This is the sinus grafting protocol that we taught last week on the Sinus course.

It’s 400 dental implants and 300 sinus grafts over 10 years with 97.5% survival rate.

We pay no attention to residual height (or almost no attention) and place based on primary stability alone.

We load, a lot of the time, at 6-8 weeks.

95% of my implants are placed simultaneously.

I almost never do a closed sinus lift because there are more failure rates with closed sinus lifts than lateral windows.

All that comes after the Fellow’s meeting and dinner which is being held tonight where (hopefully) Colin Burns will be elected Chair of the ITI, and then take a big deep breath for the congress on the Saturday and then home.

It’s been 3 Saturdays working on the bounce for me, and that is unusual. A busy end to the week for me and then feet up!

Blog post number: 1624