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CAD/CAM - international magazine of digital dentistry

I opinion _ implantology _Introduction It all started with an inquiry from a well-known professional journal of implantology asking for a contribution to acknowledge their having been in business for 15 years. Then there was the incidental telephone call by an academic teacher who had ac- companied and supported me in my first steps in implantology. When I asked him about the upcoming publicationproject,Ireceivedabothspontaneousand surprising reply, “The last 15 years—those were the most important years in implantology”! This from a renowneduniversityprofessorwhowasinstrumental in establishing implantology—I was impressed. Later on I had to ask myself, “Is this really true?” The result of my tracing this development is this article—a personal retrospective. _Phases of implantology If one considers oral implantology with regard to its major developments, three phases are evident: (i) theempiricalandexperimentalphase;(ii)thearrivalof implantology in universities and science; (iii) the mass phenomenon of implantology. I would like to add that thisisaroughandprobablysuperficialdivisiontosome extent.Please,however,allowmetoapplyitwithinthe scopeofthispersonal—andnotexhaustive—review. Lookingbackatthesepastfifteenyears,Iwillbarely touch on phase II, but will discuss phase III fully. This entailsdifferentdirectionsandpriorityareasthatcol- leagues working in implantology experienced. When I browsed through implantology textbooks and jour- nals from this period, I realised even more that im- plantologyhadundergoneconsiderablechangeinthis relatively short period of 15 years. I would like to re- count my highlights of implantology from this period in the following paragraphs. _Farewell to the tristesse of papers A seemingly minor issue to start with: the variety and quality of dentistry-specific print media and of digital media, particularly print layout, has developed substantially during the past 15 years. This holds true not only for implantology, but also for dentistry as a whole. The appearance of some professional journals up until the mid-1990s was reminiscent of an official legalamendment,butamazingthingshavehappened since.Thequalityofcolourprinting(whichisthenorm now,butusedtobesubjecttoasurchargeforauthors whowantedtoincludecolourimages),theaccuracyof images,thepaper—allofthesemakeforahighquality appearance and leave a lasting impression on the reader. This has clearly been an advantage also for implantology because now highly complex correla- tions can be more easily conveyed and “sometimes a pictureisworthathousandwords”.Ideally,e-learning and electronic professional journals supplement the current training needs of the younger generation of dentists especially. The most important years in implantology A very personal retrospect Author_Dr Georg Bach, Germany 16 I CAD/CAM 1_2013 Fig. 2 Fig. 3Fig. 1