The time to jump?
The times are changing, and faster and faster.
Many years ago, I wrote a blog called Ride the Wave of Change; it's here.
I look back at that time now and think about how slow the pace of change was in comparison to today.
One of the things in my work that I've become interested in is computer-aided implant surgery (CAIS).
This is obviously a hot topic now, otherwise known as guided surgery and implant dentistry, and lots of people have lots of variations of this, but the interesting thing is that I became interested in computer-aided implant surgery around 2013.
At that stage, I bought a CT machine from a company called Sirona, and also a milling machine, and a card cam design machine and all of it cost around 150,000 pounds at that time.
I look back at that and think that that was entirely insane, and what was I thinking, but it allowed us to caterpillar ourselves to guided surgery at a stage before almost anyone was doing it.
Over 10 years ago, Alison broke a lower right 1st molar tooth, and I provided that treatment as an immediate implant placement with guided surgery and an immediate restoration with an anatomical healing abutment (if you're not dental, you won't understand that, but it's becoming all the rage at the moment, 13 years later).
And so I'm aware of the technology and the developments of this, and I've been watching for 13 years, even though I was distracted somewhat by building a practice.
One of the things I did do, though, was design a practice which had the ability to adopt any of the emerging technologies and to be altered and changed as required to sustain those.
And so the next ‘big’ thing in dentistry is robotic surgery.
Robotic surgery has become absolutely standard in various aspects of medicine in which it is most suited to work.
Particularly in areas where the surgeon has to work in extremely confined spaces and, in order to do that, has to cause considerable surgical damage to access (think prostate surgery).
Robotic surgery and dentistry is somewhat different because effectively what the robot does is exactly the same as what the surgeon does with no limitation of restriction of access.
What robotic surgery does is provide something which is extraordinarily more accurate than the surgeon does, but the difference between a good surgeon and a robot may not be clinically significant (a very small variation in the position of the implant may not lead to greater outcomes).
It is, though, the future of implant dentistry and if not quite now, then quite soon. There are already 100,000 dental implants placed by the robots, mostly in China.
The clinical room we provide all of our teaching in at The Campbell Clinic is designed to host a robotic surgical device (I thought about this at the time back in 2018), and so the question now is: when should we jump?
One of the restricting factors for us is that there is no CE licence for robotic surgery in Europe, but it's only a matter of time before that happens.
My friends in Poland have already managed to achieve a special licence to do this, and contacts that I have in Hong Kong have been providing this treatment for quite some time now, as well as much of the associated research.
It’s fascinating, isn't it? It's the type of thing that could keep me interested in dentistry for the next 25 years, and perhaps that alone would be worth the investment and the time spent figuring out the robot.
Blog Post Number - 4650
Leave a comment