Thank you Jerry. Only you will understand this, but I started in dentistry first by trying to find a very small lower class 5 on cuspid on all my friends, for a guy who was taking his boards, then passing gold foil to him all day while he took them weeks later. I have greensticked margins on full denture impressions (Green stick! wasn't that in prehistoric times?) injected heated hydrocolloid and used a water cooled tray, around a margin of a prep while pulling epi soaked string (there was no presoaked gingi-pac material in those days. I owned a ceramic lab that specialized in a brand new technique that no one had ever heard of - Vitadur from Germany, that used an aluminous oxide core instead of a metal coping and was actually strong enough to hold up to the masticating forces. And I was the first Vita Porcelain instructor in the US back when it was originally being sold by Unitek in the very early 70's.

I have taught more students how to do full dentures, ceramics, and even chrome cobalt cast partial dentures than I can count. Dr. Kratochvil and I worked on developing the I bar passive (parallel planes design) partial denture frame work design theory in the early 80's together as I knew him when he was a Navy dentist in the 70's.

I owned the first non precious ceramic metal company in the world, when gold prices originally spiked to 800 an ounce and sold it to a Japanese firm two years later, right before the prices dropped (lucky timing not smarts). I am the co-inventor of the UCLA abutment which was the first subgingival attachment of a crown to an implant on the Branemark system with Dr. John Beumer at UCLA. Our original concept crown which was hand waxed by me to the top of the implant 4 mm deep in the tissue, (before there were machined plastic or ceramic gold components which my firm later made a fortune selling) is still functioning today decades later on a beautiful woman in tooth location number 9.

Most of the prosthetic attachments you take for granted on implants I developed when I owned Implant Support Systems Inc. (ISS), from O ring over denture attachments for all implant systems, to Hader bars. I have lectured on implantable devices at over 34 universities in the US. I was the first non doctor invited to speak at the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery annual meeting where I discussed the issues related to stress shielding of bone and its eventual reabsorption when implants are surgically placed at extreme angles, this in the very early days of implants when surgeons didn't understand the implications of angulation on the prosthetic outcome, let alone the bone loss by adverse loading. I also adopted Ante's Rule for crown and bridge work in a publication of the International Journal of Oral and Maxillofacilal Prosthetics for use in calculating the surface area of implants as determiners of appropriate size selection for different spans of edentulous space. I am also a contributor on a WB Saunders Publishing book on dental implants with Chuck Babbish and Axel Kirsh both pioneers in the field.

When I worked as VP of Denar the original gnathology articulator company that Dr. Niles Guichet designed the device for, it was before VHS video. He and I were lecturing in Hong Kong and we saw a street hawker that was selling little hand crank toy movie cameras on the street with porno looping 3 minute movies in them. I found the company that made them and we created a 3 minute looping movie of how to put on the Denar face bow which was a nightmare, had them put into these little hand crank movie devices, and provided them to doctors when they bought the articulator for 3,000 dollars. Now after saying that I was doing all this before VHS video, do you think I feel older than dirt? I don't talk much about my dental CV because it isn't pertinent in my life any more though I am still a lecturer at various meetings that are not OC related and I will be at the Maxillofacial Prosthetic Meeting this year talking prosthetics and not cancer. As you can see this isn't my first dance....

Before all this I was a 19 year old first responder corpsman attached to the Marines treating traumatic amputations, sucking chest wounds, and more with no doctor within a hundred miles, in the middle of a fire fight near a town I couldn't even pronounce the name of. If you are ever shot or in a horrible traffic accident, some say that I am the guy you want sitting next to you when it happens. The first time I knelt down next to a guy with tension pneumothorax and unable to breath from a bullet wound in his chest, I was overwhelmed that by doing something as simple as sticking my finger down into the wound to plug it up allowed him to inflate his lung and breath again. I will never forget the feeling of his heart beating next to my finger, nor how that event changed the direction of my life. Medicine and dentistry are all that I know.