Dentist Ilkay Gul

Born in Antakya. Graduated from Samsun On Dokuz Mayıs University Faculty of Dentistry. Working in his own clinic in Antakya before the February 6 earthquakes, Gül is a successful clinician who continued his career in Ankara after the earthquakes.

Could you introduce yourself?

Hello, I am Specialist Dentist İlkay Gül. I was born in Antakya in 1988 and lived there until the end of my high school years. I graduated from Selim Nevzat Şahin Anatolian High School in 2006 and won the Samsun On Dokuz Mayıs University Faculty of Dentistry. I graduated from here in 2012 with the title of dentist. I started my specialization training in Hatay Mustafa Kemal University Faculty of Dentistry, Department of Prosthetics in 2016 and completed it in 2019 and continued my professional life as a prosthetic dentist.
While I was continuing my work as a clinician in our clinic that I opened with my partners in Antakya in 2022, I came to Ankara and became a part of the Dental Estetik Center family due to the destruction of our city on February 6.

Can you talk a little about earthquakes and tell us about your journey to Ankara?

That night was a nightmare for everyone living there. We turned off our lights and went to sleep, not knowing we would never turn them on again, and a few hours later we woke up to a violent and unending tremor. My wife was almost 8 months pregnant, so my only wish during the earthquake was to get out of the house without anything happening to her or our child. When the earthquake finally stopped, we ran out of our heavily damaged house. When we got out, it was a disaster; the roof had been crushed and the back window had broken due to the rubble falling on our car. Fortunately, the front of our car was fine, we got in the car and tried to go straight to my mother. When we got there, we saw that half of the building had collapsed. We were able to pull out those who were still alive under the rubble in the apartment thanks to the help of those who came to help. Thankfully, my mother and sister were among the survivors because they were on the top floor. When we were able to get to my other sister, her husband and my nephew who had not yet turned one, we saw that their building was also badly damaged and all of the walls had collapsed, and thankfully they were able to get out of the apartment next door alive. My wife was 8 months pregnant, my mother had a contusion on her foot that I didn't know how serious it was. The hospitals we saw around us were destroyed. So we first went to Adana with our own vehicles and then to Ankara a few days later.
Ankara was the safest haven for us because my wife's two siblings were here and it was relatively safe in terms of earthquakes.

What are your thoughts and work on digital transformation and artificial intelligence?

We live in a time when technology is advancing at a full speed, downhill. Now, even in the time it takes to take out the phone in our pocket to talk and then put it back, a new update about the phone is coming. While the digital process is advancing at this speed, dentistry has adapted to these developments very quickly and has a treatment protocol that can incorporate them in a very short time. In light of these developments, many innovations have emerged, from imaging methods to production techniques. For example, thanks to “dental volumetric” tomography, all surgical applications and implant planning of our patients are carried out with precision with detailed images obtained only from the jaw area, while the amount of radiation the patient is exposed to compared to medical tomography has decreased by 6 to 10 times depending on the devices used. With the introduction of surgical plates that we prepare with this imaging into our lives, we can perform completely seamless implant operations on our patients in suitable cases and send them off from our clinic in a very short time. The treatment protocol for porcelain or zirconium crown prostheses, commonly known as “dental coatings”, had a long and detailed production process such as reducing the size of the tooth, taking measurements with traditional methods, sending these measurements to technician laboratories and producing them there. With digital transformation, this process was removed from the treatment protocol, measurements were taken in seconds with digital scanners in the mouth, production was started in clinics on the same day, and our patients left our clinics with their real teeth within hours. In this way, both we and our patients gained a serious advantage in terms of time. In addition, by including artificial intelligence in the measurement and production stages, we eliminated many problems that may arise in the intermediate stages in addition to saving time.

How will developments in artificial intelligence and digital dentistry pave the way for our country in health tourism?

Success in health tourism can be directly related to the quality of the treatment and the completion of this treatment in the shortest possible time. Of course, the most important factor in achieving this is the knowledge, experience and expertise of the physicians who will plan the diagnosis and treatment, and their ability to draw the right plan and draw a roadmap accordingly. The long-term and successful treatment is possible by evaluating all factors in detail for each individual and implementing them specifically for each person. The digital transformation in dentistry, with the innovations it brings, prevents us as physicians from overlooking the factors in our patients' existing conditions in this process, and also ensures that our patients are informed correctly and in detail about the treatment. This has created ways that both increase our treatment quality and reduce the time required for our treatments. In addition, thanks to the plans made using artificial intelligence, the way has been opened for treatments that we could not apply before. For example, orthodontic problems such as crowding could only be treated with braces and monthly doctor visits in the past. In the current system, thanks to treatments planned using artificial intelligence, our patients can have this treatment more aesthetically with transparent plates. Moreover, in this treatment plan, the result at the end of the treatment period can be shown to the patient digitally. In appropriate cases, by delivering a few of the plates that the patient will use, we can successfully complete the long-term treatments of our patients abroad by reducing the number of doctor visits. Successfully applying these and many similar treatments and properly promoting them abroad will increase the number of foreign patients coming to our country and contribute greatly to both our national economy and our international prestige.

What is the one day dental concept treatment?

Basically, the concept of teeth in one day is the procedure of our patients leaving our clinic with their teeth on the same day. This concept covers a wide range from the crowning of a single tooth of our patients to the placement of all the teeth of our completely toothless patients in one day. By incorporating intraoral scanners and milling devices into our organization and producing in our own laboratory, we take digital measurements of our patients who come in the morning, deliver the real crowns to our patients in the afternoon and send them off from our clinic. In cases of complete toothlessness, the implant operation we perform with plates that we will prepare using tomography and 3D printers allows us to replace all teeth in 1 day even in cases of complete toothlessness. Digital dentistry allows patients and doctors to spend more time on themselves by eliminating the intermediate stages of treatment and shortening the treatment period. This is especially important for clinics targeting health tourism.

What is the importance of the concept of health tourism and one day teeth in the accelerating world?

The world has really sped up. People can have breakfast in one country, lunch in another country and fall asleep in another country at night. This process, which used to take days, now only takes hours. Today, it has become quite common for people from all over the world to travel to different countries to get the treatment they want. People no longer just want to complete their treatments. They also want to visit, see and get to know the places they go. The concept of one day teeth significantly reduces the time our patients spend in dental clinics, leaving them more time to travel. In this way, this process, which we call health tourism, allows them to spend more time in our country by allocating more time to the tourism part.

What advice do you have for young people who want to become dentists?

As in every field, it is vital to be able to follow the current and new in dentistry. My advice to my young friends who are preparing for exams and aiming to become dentists is to observe a few dental clinics before making their choices and make their decisions accordingly, and from the moment they take their first step on this path, not to be satisfied with what is given to them and to always try to follow all the innovations that are changing in the world in this field. In this age where it is very easy to access information, they should not forget how important it is to stay away from information pollution and to use scientific methods to reach the right information.