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EDITORIAL | |
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Dental implant practice in India: Does it need a regulatory change?
Sharat Shetty
Editor-in-Chief, JDI, Prosmile Dental Clinic and Implant Centre, Dr. L H Hiranandani Hospital, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Date of Web Publication | 15-Feb-2018 |
Correspondence Address:
Sharat Shetty
Editor-in-Chief, JDI, Prosmile Dental Clinic and Implant Centre, Dr. L H Hiranandani Hospital, Mumbai, Maharashtra
India
Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None
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DOI: 10.4103/jdi.jdi_4_18
How to cite this article: Shetty S. Dental implant practice in India: Does it need a regulatory change?. J Dent Implant 2017;7:39-40 |
The average life expectancy of Indian men and women have risen to 68 years. This is due to many factors including cleaner drinking water, control of many communicable and non-communicable diseases and availability of modern medical facilities and services. This has seen an increase in a significant percentage of elderly patients in Indian population and hence increased incidences of partial and total edentulism. These dentally crippled patients avail of the various available options of replacements depending on the clinicians attending on them. Dental implant prosthesis are the best options and many patients do opt for these relatively expensive treatments. But are the clinicians in India able to deliver minimum satisfactory and quality dental implant care to these patients? Unfortunately, NO.
There has been many manifold increase in the number of clinicians performing implant placements and restorations on them. We also see a large number of failures, compromises, deficiencies and even wrong treatments done with the dental implants. Most of them go unreported. It is surprising and even sadder to see implants being done with not enough training. Across the globe, a dental practice can only be done by those who have achieved some minimum levels of learning both theoretical and practical through a dental school. Moreover, even continuing with the dental practice every year needs accumulating some credit points earned by attending professional development education programs. And those who practice without formal training are aptly regarded as QUACKS.
Dental implantology is a specialized science needing greater understanding of the surgical and restorative protocols, which are much more critical than the routine dental procedures. So, the outcomes of inappropriate implant treatment can be catastrophic and unmanageable. Barring some specialty trainings offering implants as a part of their curriculum of the postgraduate course, most other graduates have sparse or no exposure to implant science. This makes most of patients vulnerable to faulty implant therapies. The only learning of such a vast discipline is attending a one day to few days of commercial courses conducted by the industry and self-styled educationalists. Though department of implant dentistry has been set up in dental institutions in last few years to make new graduates knowledgeable and competent with this aspect of dental treatment, there is still a huge number of dental practitioners who have no idea of the benefits of this science to the patients denying them best of treatments and opting for other irreversible therapies.
What are the solutions? Dental implant education must be made compulsory for all clinicians. This would make available implant solutions to all patients and provide clinicians phenomenal opportunity to grow successfully and happily. Situations needing implant therapies can be considered as straightforward, advanced and complex. Training for each group can be made available. The only fair training is to standardize implant education rather than biased instructions which are prevalent today. All clinicians can then perform implant procedures predictably following a set protocol irrespective of the systems used. They can learn and do basic or straightforward surgical and prosthetic cases first, grow and gain in experience but stay within their training and refer out what is beyond their expertise, and then move on to learn from more advanced courses.
This can be easily achieved by regulatory bodies like the national and state councils and national implant bodies which will lay out guidelines for mentored education systems. All other implant education providers can get approvals and recognition from these regulating agencies.
The faster this happens; the future will not need any undoing and face an uphill task of dealing with complications and failures and most importantly disservice met to the patients presently. So, it can neither be ignored, delayed or differed.
“The world is dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
-Albert Einstein
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