Although just a surgical technique, the side bracket configuration implant, or S implant, or snake implant, has become famous enough to deserve its own section, where we will collect all the information and updates regarding it. The S implant was born in 1998, following a pressing, obsessive and repeated request by a patient to Dr. Silvano U. Tramonte. He wanted to have his severe right mandibular atrophy solved without IAN translation, unreliable bone augmentations, removable prosthesis, or anything different from a pure and simple traditional prosthesis on implants instead of natural teeth.
Anyone suffering from severe mandibular atrophy presents an advanced vertical madibular resorption, leaving very little residual bone above the mandibular canal, but often having fairly preserved bone under it. The challenge consisted of finding the way to use the patient`s residual bone almost completely concentrated under the IAN. This prompted the birth of the S implant, placed in a side bracket configuration. Eleven years later the implant is known worldwide: Cabalcante for Spanish speakers, S implant or, more colorfully, Snake Implant, as called by Dr. Scott Davis, of Emerald Beach, Australia.
The article we present here is derived from a famous talk given by Dr. Tramonte at the XIX World ICOI Congress in Buenos Ayres, that elicited so much interest and enthusiasm so as to request a repeat, performed in a hall made available especially for the conference.
The proceedings of the entire conference are being prepared, together with all the clinical and scientific material accumulated to date.