The origin · Angola · Cooperation

A country in civil war. People with no solution. He went.

Fresh out of university, in the late 1980s, Philippe Cotten left for Angola as part of a cooperation programme. The country was in the midst of civil war. There were no dental facilities, no access to care, no solutions for those suffering pain, infections, emergencies. With the means available — and often without the means he needed — he worked to give an answer to those who had none. He created a training programme for nurses so they could help the population in emergencies when no professional could reach them.

It wasn't implantology. It was the same question that would stay with him all his life: what do you do when there is no solution?

The technique · Basal implantology

The 'inoperable' patients. The same philosophy, applied to surgery.

Philippe Cotten discovered basal implantology — a technique that allows implants to be placed in patients without enough bone, with no bone graft, and a fixed prosthesis within 0 to 48 hours. The very patients who had been told there was no solution. For years he practised it, refined it and built his own protocols, shaped by decades of real cases in France, Spain, Africa and Central America.

A technique learned. A method built. They are two different things.

His own innovation · DMHF

What no one teaches: the practitioner's state changes everything.

After decades in the operating room and the training room, Philippe Cotten identified something that university programmes overlook: the practitioner's mental state at the moment of the clinical act directly influences the quality of their work. From that observation was born DMHF, Decision Making & Human Factors — a self-assessment tool no other mentor offers.