Ilkay Gul Interview

Could you please introduce yourself?

Hello, I am the specialist dentist İlkay Gül. I was born in Antakya in 1988 and lived here until the end of my high school life. I graduated from Selim Nevzat Şahin Anatolian High School in 2006 and won the Faculty of Dentistry of Samsun On Dokuz Mayıs University. I graduated from here in 2012 with the title of dentist.

I started my specialty education in Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, Faculty of Dentistry, Department of Prosthodontics in 2016 and continued my professional life as a prosthetic dentistry specialist.

While continuing my work as a clinician in our clinic, which we opened with my partners in Antakya in 2022, I came to Ankara on February 6, and became a part of the Dental Aesthetic Center family, due to the destruction of our city.

Can you talk a little bit about the earthquake and your process of coming to Ankara?

That night was a nightmare for everyone who lived there. A few hours after we switched off our lights and went to sleep, not knowing that we would ever turn it on again, we awoke to a violent and unending jolt. My wife was almost 8 months pregnant, so my only wish during the earthquake was to be able to leave the house without anything happening to her and our child. When the earthquake finally stopped, we ran out of our heavily damaged house. When we got out, the situation was a disaster, the roof was crushed due to the pieces of rubble falling on our car, and the rear window was broken. Fortunately, there was no problem in the front of our car, we got in the car and tried to go directly to my mothers. When we got there, we found that half of the building had collapsed. Thanks to those who came to help us, we were able to remove the survivors from the rubble in the apartment. Fortunately, my mother and brother were among the survivors as they were on the top floor.

When we were able to reach my other brother, his wife and my nephew, who was not yet one year old, we saw that their building was also heavily damaged and all its walls were destroyed, and thankfully they were able to get out of the next apartment alive. My wife was 8 months pregnant, my mother had a crush on her foot that I don’t know how serious it was. The hospitals around us were destroyed. That’s why we came to Adana with our own vehicles and then to Ankara a few days later.

Since my wife’s two siblings are here and it is relatively safe in terms of earthquakes, Ankara has been the safest harbor for us to take shelter :).

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

We live in a time where technology is advancing at a full, downhill pace. Now, even in the time it takes to take the phone out of our pocket to talk and then put it back in place, a new update is coming about the phone. While the digital process was advancing at this pace, dentistry has adapted very quickly to these developments and has a treatment protocol that can be incorporated in a very short time. In the light of these developments, many innovations have emerged, from imaging methods to production techniques. For example, thanks to dental volumetric tomographies, all surgical applications and implant planning of the patients were made sensitively with detailed images obtained only from the chin area of our patients, while the amount of radiation that the patient was exposed to compared to medical tomography was reduced by 6 to 10 times depending on the devices used. With the introduction of the surgical plates we prepared with this imaging into our lives, in appropriate cases, we can perform implant operations on our patients in a completely seamless manner and send them off from our clinic in a very short time.

The treatment protocol for porcelain or zirconium crown prosthesis, which is generally known as ‘tooth veneer’ among the people, had a long and detailed production process such as reducing the tooth, taking measurements with traditional methods, and sending these measurements to technician laboratories and producing them there. With the digital transformation, this process was removed from the treatment protocol, measurements were taken in seconds with digital scanners in the mouth, production started in the 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, we have eliminated many problems that may arise in the intermediate stages, as well as saving time with the inclusion of artificial intelligence in the measurement and production stages.

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

Success in health tourism; It can be directly related to the quality of the treatment and the completion of this treatment as soon as possible. Of course, the most important factor in providing these is the knowledge, experience and experience of the physicians who will plan the diagnosis and treatment, and their ability to draw the right planning and draw a road map accordingly. A long-term and successful treatment is possible with a detailed evaluation of all factors for each individual and their specific application.

The digital transformation in dentistry, with its innovations, not only prevents the factors in the existing conditions of our patients from being overlooked in this process, but also provides our patients with accurate and detailed information about the treatment. This has led to ways that both increase our quality of treatment and reduce the time required for our treatments. In addition, thanks to the plans made using artificial intelligence, the way for treatments that we could not apply before has been opened. For example, our orthodontic problems such as crowding could only be treated with braces and monthly physician visits. Thanks to the treatments planned using artificial intelligence in the current system, our patients can achieve this treatment in a more aesthetic way with transparent aligners. Moreover, in this treatment plan, the patient can be shown digitally what the result will be at the end of the treatment period. We can successfully complete the long-term treatments of our patients abroad by reducing the number of physician visits by delivering a few of the plaques to be used by the patient in appropriate cases.

Successfully applying this and many similar treatments and promoting them abroad correctly will increase the number of foreign patients coming to our country and will greatly contribute to both our country’s economy and our international prestige.

What is dental concept treatment in one day?

Basically, the one day dental concept is the procedure for our patients to leave our clinic with their teeth on the same day.

Within this concept, it covers a wide range from covering the only existing tooth of our patients to putting all the teeth of our completely edentulous patients in one day.

By incorporating intraoral scanners and milling devices, we produce in our own laboratory, take digital measurements of our patient who arrives in the morning, and deliver their real coatings to our patient in the afternoon and send them off from our clinic.

In cases of complete edentulism, the implant operation we perform with plaques that we will prepare using tomography and 3D printers allows us to replace all teeth in 1 day, even in complete edentulism. By eliminating the intermediate stages of treatment, digital dentistry allows the treatment time to be shortened, allowing patients and physicians to spare more time for themselves. This is especially important for clinics targeting health tourism.

What is the importance of the dental concept in a day in health tourism and the accelerating world?

The world has really accelerated. People can have breakfast in one country and eat lunch in another country and fall asleep in another country in the evening. We need only hours for this process that used to take days. 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 treatment. However, they also want to travel, see and get to know the places they go. The one-day dental concept considerably reduces the time our patients spend in dental clinics, leaving more time for them to visit. In this way, we allocate more time to the tourism part of this process, which we call health tourism, and allow them to spend more enjoyable time in our country.

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

As in every field, it is vital to follow the current and the new in dentistry. My advice to my young friends who are preparing for exams and aiming for dentistry is to observe a few dental clinics and make their decisions accordingly, and to try to keep up with all the innovations that are changing in the world in this field, from the moment they take the first step on this path. They should not forget how important it is to stay away from information pollution and take care to use scientific methods to reach the right information in this age when it is very easy to reach information.