IDS Done!
IDS done!
What a show- It’s HUGE, and I mean huge in a way I could not have imagined.
My Apple Watch says I covered 20k over the 2 days!
As well as exercising my feet, IDS baffled my brain, there was so much to see. Possibly too much for 2.5 days.
The huge halls that never seemed to end, the many tiny companies selling dental stuff. Lots and lots of dental stuff, every variety size, shape and price bracket of dental stuff.
The weird and wonderfully shaped implants, the small beers, the curried Frankfurters, the small trader with every variety of instrument and also 5 implant brands, the implant company with one line of implants and very large, luxurious seating area serving aromatic tonics, the mind-boggling number of intra-oral scanners, the beautifully designed stands, the hordes of people, the yacht-themed dental surgery, the vast arrays of 3D printers, the digital dentures, the 3d printed photo milkshake, I could go on and on.
What was very eye opening was seeing the size and scale of the dental industry worldwide.
It was also interesting to see great ideas at the wrong price, devices and gadgets that had missed their time and been overtaken by new and, better technology and sometimes, just sometimes, the right idea at the right time at the right price.
I also had the realisation that the sales dental companies make come from millions of dentists making millions of clinical decisions based on research (quite often their own) and our belief in their products. We make our living as dentists by passing this belief onto patients who then buy the service and material from us. When I saw these “palaces”- some were so impressive that they should not be called a stand, I asked myself a few questions about our industry.
Is it that the bigger the stand the bigger the belief? Or the bigger the stand the better the product? Or, the better the research, the better the product, the better the belief, the bigger the sales and then, the bigger the stand?
I hope that in this environment true innovations that can help dentists help patients can still make it through the marketplace. I take my hat off to the entrepreneurs from all over the world taking a plunge and making gadgets, providing services, and finding ways of improving what we can do as dentists.
The size of this industry is huge. The number of products is infinite. The choice we all have is to decide what we are going to use on our patients and why- there’s always a cheaper option, but is the reason for using it financial or clinical?
I am back. Back to Brexit. Back to knife crime. Back to terrorist acts. Back to reality and thankfully back to the family.
Time to open up the bag and start using some of the stuff I bought that I believe is going to help me help patients.
