I had a call with Poland in the last two weeks. It was with a young woman in her early thirties who is already an ITI fellow and is already travelling the world to show people how to do guided surgery properly—a real inspiration.
We discussed the possibility of educating the younger generation in implant dentistry and how we might go about that, and she explained to me that in Poland, the vast majority of dentists learn from YouTube.
She was very frustrated because she's lucky enough to be up close to the top of the pyramid for various reasons, and she gets to fix all the stuff that goes wrong, which is an excellent business model if you have the trust, except it depresses you about how much goes wrong.
There is this conception now among younger people that everything can be learned on YouTube.
You can learn to change the spark plugs in your car or cross stitch or do any other number of skills you can practice at home, and if you get wrong, it doesn't matter.
The same is not entirely true for drilling holes into the middle of people's heads.
For years, we have provided a sinus grafting life skills course spanning over three days.
Many people look at that course and talk to us about it, thinking, 'Well, I'm never going to provide sinus grafting, so there's no point in me doing the course'.
But, if you are someone who provides dental implants, then you're going to encounter situations where patients need sinus grafting, and at the very least, it would be really useful to understand what that entails and what is involved.
When it gets to this time of year, and we're talking about the sinus course again (20th – 22nd September), I always tell the story of my friend and colleague Chris Navarro.
Chris is a model of how a practitioner can train in implant dentistry in the modern world and make himself an expert, providing extraordinarily high-quality work.
Chris has educated himself through a bespoke pathway, part of which has led to an MSc, but much of which has been about learning practical implant dentistry for the benefit of his patients and now his team.
Chris pushes this virtue and this format out to his team members and has trained various young individuals in implant dentistry through his practice.
Chris did our sinus grafting course twice (he's done almost every other course once).
On the first occasion, he wasn't ready to provide sinus grafting in practice, but what he will tell you is that his understanding of guided bone regeneration, bone grafting, sinus grafting, implant placement and surgery at a complex level moved on a massive amount from that first course.
When Chris got to the second course, he had two sinus grafting patients lined up for the following Monday, and I went into his practice and sat in his office drinking coffee while he provided two sinus grafts and never asked me back again.
That is success in education at the very highest level.
If you want to enhance your surgical skills, one of the areas where you could best do that would be understanding this procedure.
As one of my former colleagues in maxillofacial surgery and my consultant and mentor, Iain McVicar (sadly passed away this year), told me many years ago, an apicectomy encompasses every aspect of surgical procedure if you can provide an apicectomy to a high standard, you can be a surgeon.
I think the same is true for sinus grafting.
If you know how to do it, you pretty much know how to do anything.
Our live skills course spans over three days, one day of the surgical aspects and theory and research and science behind sinus grafting together with the basic skills and anatomy.
The second day is hugely practical, where you do your own sinus grafting under close supervision using an animal model.
The third is live surgery, with me providing fully live sinus grafting on the video for you to pick apart.
More details can be found here if you're interested in becoming a much better surgeon.
Blog Post Number - 3484