I qualified as a dentist in Lisbon in 2006, at the Egas Moniz Institute of Health Sciences, and I could have stayed. Portugal trains excellent dentists, and there was a comfortable career waiting in general practice. But general dentistry felt like the introduction to a book I wanted to read whole — and the chapters I was missing, the deep chapters on surgery and implant dentistry and full-mouth rehabilitation, were scattered across the world in the places where they had been written. So I went to read them where they were written.
London came first, in 2007 — I have practised here ever since, and it is home. New York ran alongside it: an advanced international programme at NYU College of Dentistry, one of the world's great implant departments, where I saw American implant dentistry at industrial scale and academic depth — enormous case volume, relentless documentation, protocols tested on numbers a single clinic could never generate. Then Havana in 2008, for a postgraduate certification in advanced oral surgery. People are always surprised by Cuba until they understand it: Cuban hospital surgery teaches you to be excellent with your hands precisely because you cannot rely on having every gadget. Resourcefulness is a surgical skill — arguably the surgical skill — and nowhere teaches it better.
The academic spine
The University of Warwick gave the discipline its spine: a master's degree in implant dentistry, years of assessed academic and clinical work. A weekend course teaches you what to do; a master's degree teaches you why — the biomechanics, the evidence base, the complication management — and, more valuable still, when not to operate at all. Every 'impossible' case I have accepted since, every full-arch rehabilitation on resorbed bone, every revision of failed work, was accepted on the strength of that why. In a field where UK patients have no specialist register to consult, that academic depth is the substance behind the words 'implant dentist'.
The Brazilian chapter
In 2013 I did something colleagues thought was career suicide: I interrupted a working London practice and moved to Brazil. São Paulo is one of the world's great capitals of implantology research and aesthetic dentistry — Brazilian patients are famously demanding about aesthetics, Brazilian masters are famously generous with their knowledge, and the surgical volume is enormous. I graduated from CETO and completed the APCD's international advanced programme in implant dentistry, training alongside names I had been citing in essays for years. Brazil taught me that a technically perfect implant that looks wrong is a failure — that the gum line, the smile curve, the way a tooth catches light, are clinical outcomes, not cosmetic afterthoughts.
Then came the refinements, each chosen to close a specific gap: bone augmentation and grafting techniques in Frankfurt; Professor Choukroun's platelet-rich fibrin protocols in Nice — the biology of healing, using the patient's own blood to regenerate tissue; and intravenous and inhalation sedation at Queen Mary University of London, because the patients who need the most surgery are so often the ones who fear it most. Four continents, one curriculum: the whole patient, from the biology under the gum to the fear behind the eyes.
Each country taught a different answer to the same question: what do you do when the textbook case refuses to be textbook?
Why does any of this matter to a patient searching for an implant dentist in London in 2026? Because complex cases do not follow one national school. The patient whose bone resorbed for twenty years needs Cuban resourcefulness at the surgical stage, Brazilian aesthetic judgment at the design stage, American protocol discipline throughout, and British academic caution deciding the sequence — sometimes in the same appointment. I went to four continents so my patients would not have to. Everything I learned funnels into two clinics in West London, and into every treatment plan I sign.