Around the first week of June, we will take delivery and be onboarded for Straumann's new product, Falcon.
It sounds like a top-secret project, doesn't it? In fact, it is a device that allows us to provide dynamic guided surgery.
Dynamic-guided surgery in implant dentistry is different to static-guided implant surgery.
In static surgery, you make a guide, which is restrictive. It allows you to hold your drill in exactly the right position while you drill a hole front to back, side to side, and depth-wise as accurately as your computer planning was (if you do it right).
Dynamic guided surgery has no guide.
You plan the implants in the same way, and then you pick up a handpiece and locate it inside the mouth. With your augmented reality glasses, you start to drill, and the glasses tell you everything's in the right place.
You're just as required and place your implant perfectly (That's the idea)
It's been around for a while dynamic guided surgery, both with a company called Navident and one called Mininavident, the latter being the one that Straumann bought just a couple of years ago to develop this new product in line with the rest of their digital universe.
So, as I speak this and you read this, you'll think this is batsh*t mental, and it's never going to take off, but it's worth remembering that lots of people said that when we took delivery of one of the first iTero scanners in the country in about 2009.
It never worked (it never even nearly worked), and I ultimately fell out with the supplier and left it in the car park for them to collect because they wanted me to have it anyway and pay £25,000.
But if I told you now that I would give you a free IOS scanner in implant dentistry, you would take it in a second because they're so reliable.
The same thing happened with CBCT.
We were so early into this (even though we thought we were late) that we were able to catapult ourselves forward and it had so many benefits bringing that into our Clinic in 2009.
The same thing happened again with static-guided surgery and CEREC when we were milling implant surgical guides in CEREC machines back in 2014/15.
If you think that Falcon is too far ahead and too much of a stretch, I can tell you that when I was in Singapore last week and just ambling around the exhibition on my own just to see what I could see, I came across three Chinese guys in a booth who are selling a robot that places implants.
This is the step beyond dynamic guided surgery, a step where the robot does it all.
It rolls up to the patient with the guide in place, and then the robot arm extends; the patient opens their mouth, and it drills a hole.
I watched that happen on a phantom head.
I even watched it happen on a phantom head while the guy wobbled the phantom head to show how good it was.
I chatted to them for a few minutes, and obviously, they're trying to sell these things, but they're already in 100 hospitals in China.
They're just waiting for their FDA and CE approval, and then they'll start to flog them in Europe. When that happens, they'll be further ahead than Falcon, and so the process will continue.
If that scares you, it's worth remembering that if you were a man with a significant prostate condition in Nottingham and you had to have your prostate removed, it would almost certainly be being removed by the robot. There are two at the city hospital in Nottingham, and the results are extraordinary.
So, it's not really a matter of if; it's a matter of when. It's a matter of whether we can stay afloat in the chaos and carnage of all this technological advancement and see it come to fruition and become a reality.
Sadly, as always, this stuff will probably be available only to the top of the financial pyramid.
This has always been the way, but it doesn't make it any better.
It also, though, doesn't detract from the fact that this is the future we're in, and you can either go with it or turn away from it, but it will be there all the same.
Blog Post Number - 3810