Sometimes I think that the point of going away to teach and to lecture and to demonstrate is to seek out the difficult conversation with one individual.
Last Friday at the Royal College of Physicians I provided a lecture and then ¾ of the day of practical’s on our sinus grafting technique which is 14 years of data in our practice now.
Using this protocol, in almost every case, you can cut down your treatment from 9-12 months to 9-12 weeks and we have over 400 implants measured.
And so, in the practical demonstration one of the delegates came to me just to ask some further questions about things and explained to me (even though I had already explained this in the lecture) that this system was no real use to him because he had dentists who referred grafts to him who wanted to place the implants themselves therefore, they would just stick to their old system or he might lose the referrals from the practices.
When I suggested to the person involved that the ethics of that were somewhat confusing, that he seemed to be prioritising his own business requirements over the needs of his patients and one procedure for a patient instead of two might be a much better option because it reduces down complications and problems and cost and time for the patient. He just didn’t understand.
We both reached an impasse where he could not understand my point of view in terms of putting the patient’s requirements first before anything else and I was staggered at his point of view where he might put his own commercial advantage in front of a patient and so we had to leave things be.
It wasn’t a difficult interaction; it was just two people looking at each other from opposite mountain tops with a complete lack of understanding of why someone would want to be on the other person’s hill.
A long time ago I gave away the preconceived notion that everybody shares my view of the world (because nobody exactly shares anybody else’s view of the world), creating a system where patients come first (sometimes at the expense of our turnover and profit) seems the obvious way to long-term survival and success for our business, at least in my eyes.
Clearly there are other business models which work at least as well.
Blog Post Number - 3057
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