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I believe in Delia Smith.

Delia taught me how to cook, in fact she taught Alison and I how to cook properly. The complete cookery course is a work of art in how to stay within the lines and create something pretty good.

Jamie Oliver taught us how to cook more creatively and gave us the opportunity to step outside of the line by using hands full of things instead of measurements.

Once you pass the Jamie Oliver level of cooking you can actually start to use things that are just in the fridge and see what happens. You won’t be afraid of failure and sometimes you’ll create things that are absolutely amazing.

Sometimes you’ll create things that are terrible.

The same is true in teaching, teaching what I teach.

Everybody who starts out at a straightforward level wants a recipe, and it’s best that we can give them some sort of outline of our recipe, but there are of course elements of what we do which don’t go down on paper and need intuitive understanding and decision making on the spot.

In implant dentistry, it’s often necessary to cut a screw thread before you screw the implant in but there are so many factors as to whether you need that or not that you have to do it sometimes, and you have to do it for a while to figure out when to tap and when not to tap.

Sometimes you’ll get that wrong or you’ll miss judge it and then you have to have strategies to get out of that.

Sometimes in my work we have to take implants back out that become infected over time. When to take them out and when not to take them out is a spectrum, not an objective absolute, and it’s taken in conjunction with all the information you have available and perhaps the information you have from other people.

Both of these questions were directed at me last week when we were teaching. It gave us the opportunity to explain. There are some aspects that can be controlled in our line of work however there are many that can’t.

Far from being frightening, I hope that that continues forever because it’s essential that we still have the art and skill of a surgeon deep within what we do, and also the freedom and autonomy to make the decisions in the spell of the moment that we feel are for the best.

Sadly, sometimes that decision will be wrong, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person and it doesn’t mean you have to stop working.

Blog post number: 1770