So you would like to be a successful implant dentist?

Have you been placing implants for a while? Encountered any complications, failures, disasters? Oh, you haven't? Then I might suggest this might be for a number of reasons. You have exercised an uncanny skill, or even clairvoyance, in your case selection and your equipment has performed faultlessly. You are not managing to review your patients effectively, perhaps you move around a lot. You have been lucky. Or you just haven't done enough cases yet!

If I had any claim to have experience in implant dentistry, it would be in the mandibular implant overdenture, and over the 20 years or so I was involved with this group, I did attempt to emulate Per-Ingvar Brånemark's impressive success/survival rates.¹ However, I did also manage to encounter the complication of fracture of the mandible as described by Gerry Raghoebar,² but unlike him, I wasn't treating cases of extreme mandibular atrophy. What constituted my implant training programme? Well, after attending a few 1- or 2-day events in the UK, and being awakened to what was going on in the American oral surgery scene, I went to the USA in 1986 for a 3-day purely observational event, and returned with a tool kit and 10 implants.