A treatment plan is a document. It either names the implant, the porcelain, and the crown, or it does not. Most overseas cosmetic dentistry does not. The patient is handed a "package price" — eight veneers, four crowns, two implants — and the brands are absent from the page. The flight is booked against a number, not a specification.
We write ours differently. The implant is Hiossen titanium. The veneer is Ivoclar IPS e.max. The crown is zirconium dioxide, milled in-house on the day. Every figure on every itemised quote sits next to the brand that produced it, before the patient leaves the consultation room. It is not marketing. It is the only way the warranty can mean anything.
The five-year crown warranty problem.
Consider what a "five-year crown warranty" describes when the crown itself is unnamed. The patient flies home with a card. Two years in, an edge chips, or a margin lifts. They walk into any UK dentist with the warranty card and the dentist asks the only useful question: which crown? If the answer is "the one from the package," there is nothing to honour. There is no manufacturer documentation to reference, no replacement part to source, no lab to escalate to. The warranty exists on the card and nowhere else.
Now consider the same five-year warranty written against an Ivoclar IPS e.max crown. The UK dentist now has a manufacturer, a lot number, a press of pre-sintered lithium disilicate with a published flexural strength of 400 MPa and a documented bonding protocol. The Ivoclar warranty travels with the part. The replacement, if it ever comes to that, is sourceable. The crown is identifiable. The warranty is enforceable — by us, and by anyone who picks up the chart after us.
Lifetime, when the manufacturer is named.
The same logic compounds with implants. We use Hiossen titanium because Hiossen is owned by the Osstem group — a manufacturer with a published implant registry, a global parts catalogue, and clinical literature that any prosthodontist in Manchester or Belfast can look up. When we write "lifetime warranty on the implant fixture" we mean a warranty that survives the patient changing dentists, changing cities, or changing countries. The implant brand is the audit trail.
A lifetime warranty on an unnamed implant is a sentence on a leaflet. The component cannot be matched. A future restoration cannot be ordered. A failure cannot be reported back to the manufacturer because there is no manufacturer in the file. Patients sometimes ask us why we are pedantic about brand. The pedantry is the warranty.
What gets named, in writing, before the flight.
Every Lo Smiles treatment plan carries three names in writing before the patient boards the plane. The implant fixture — Hiossen titanium, with model and platform. The veneer material — Ivoclar IPS e.max, pressed or CAD, specified per tooth. The crown — zirconium dioxide, milled in our Antalya lab on the same day the prep is taken. The shade, the translucency, and the lab technician are named alongside.
None of this is unusual at a hospital. It is unusual in our category because the category trained patients to expect the package price and nothing under it. We think the patient should know what is going in their mouth before they fly to have it placed there. The treatment plan is the document that decides whether the warranty has anything to stand on. We would rather write more on the page than have less to honour later.
Eleanor’s file in our cabinet runs to nine pages, including the lot sticker peeled off the Hiossen box on the day of surgery. If she walks into a different dentist in 2031, that dentist will know exactly what to order.