To celebrate 25 years of Dentistry magazine, we’ve asked leading dental professionals for their game-changing innovation that shaped their career. In this article we asked David Houston what his game-changing product is.
David Houston is the joint principal of the Houston Group of Dental Practices, offering both NHS and private treatment.
He is the chief judge and compere of the Private Dentistry Awards and Dental Industry Awards.
Mr Houston is an editorial board member for Private Dentistry magazine and writes for numerous professional journals.
He is also the former clinical governance lead dentist of North Somerset Primary Care Trust.
He has appeared numerous times in Dentistry magazine’s top 50 most influential people in dentistry.
David Houston’s thoughts
The practice of clinical dentistry has developed to such an extent within the last 25 years it has literally transformed. To select only one product or item to encapsulate the essence of these changes is a great disservice to numerous ground-breaking and (from my personal perspective) indispensable products.
Hence, in time-honoured fashion I have taken the liberty of choosing three things which fundamentally improved and positively influenced the way in which I practised from 1995 until my retirement last year.
The development: dental implants
The ability to predictably replace missing units of the dentition on a long-term basis. Linked to functionally efficient and aesthetically pleasing fixed or removable restorations gave the profession the ability to literally transform lives.
The science: dentine bonding
The security and reliability of allowing minimally invasive dentistry to become a predictable norm resulted in a sea-change of preparation technique. The ability to preserve so much more vital and irreplaceable tissue, which had previously been sacrificed for retention, benefited all patients so treated.
The tool: digital camera
The use of high-quality images (made anonymous where appropriate) for teaching, education and ethical selling. This therefore fundamentally altered the way in which patients could be made aware of the enormous benefits of modern dentistry. Consequently it assisted in obtaining genuinely informed consent.
