Editor's Corner
Dr. Kirt E. Simmons
So the SWSO is goin' to "San Antone"- my old hometown! How things change. When I went to Winston Churchill High School there in the 1970s it was "out in the sticks" (they called it "Church on the Hill" since it was in the middle of cow pastures back then!). I practiced driving on a relatively abandoned little blacktop road called Loop 1604. Now my old high school is surrounded by apartments/businesses and Loop 1604 is a multilane busy "outer loop." Austin was a small, funky college town one could reach easily on I-35, where folks would go skinny dipping in Barton Creek. Now one cannot distinguish the end of one city or beginning of the next. The last time I drove between them at rush hour, traffic was stop-and-go the entire way!
In orthodontics things have changed as well. During my last year of dental school at UTDSSA, a respected orthodontist from Houston, Dr. Creekmore, gave a presentation including a case who needed maxillary anterior dental intrusion. Dr. Creekmore had this "crazy" idea to use a skeletal fixation screw in the anterior nasal spine to provide temporary anchorage to intrude these teeth - and it worked! I was impressed and never forgot that presentation, though it was essentially ignored by the mainstream orthodontic field. I went on to my orthodontic residency and craniofacial fellowship at the University of North Carolina, where I was fortunate to hear Dr. W. Eugene Roberts present on using dental implants as skeletal anchorage for orthodontics. The potential of this technique intrigued me greatly and I was fortunate to teach and do research with Dr. Roberts at Indiana University for several years before returning to North Carolina as faculty. In those days, any presentation on the use of implants for skeletal anchorage was rare because the concept was considered "out there" by most orthodontists. Now, everywhere I turn, I am inundated with articles, CE courses, advertisements, AJODO supplements, etc., all dealing with "miniscrews" or "temporary anchorage devices" to achieve skeletal anchorage. In the span of a few years, a concept that was considered "overkill" and "interesting but not necessary or worth the trouble" seems to be touted for most orthodontic patients! It appears "critical mass" has finally been attained for the concept of skeletal anchorage to be accepted, and now more than accepted, it has been embraced over-enthusiastically. It reminds me of the recent rush to another concept that has been around awhile, but not widely embraced until now: self-ligating brackets.
Please join us in "Old San Antone" this Fall for some great speakers, great Tex-Mex food (La Fogata is my favorite local restaurant), great sights (check out all the missions- not just the Alamo, and also the Hemisphere Tower restaurant, which revolves on a clear night) and of course, lots of great folks!