Eddie Scher, a defining figure in UK implant dentistry and former ADI president, has died after a career in clinical education.
A specialist prosthodontist and oral surgeon, lifelong educator and one of the architects of the Association of Dental Implantology, Eddie helped guide implant dentistry from its pioneering years towards the respected discipline it is today.
Pioneering implant dentistry
After qualifying from University College Hospital in 1973, he moved from general practice into the more complex restorative and surgical work that would define his career.
His name was synonymous with implant dentistry for a reason. From as early as 1985, his own clinic – the Walpole Street Dental Practice in Chelsea – was dedicated to prosthodontics and implant dentistry, years before the discipline became mainstream.
For decades, his clinical focus was dedicated to complex treatment, helping restore function and smiles for patients with the most challenging problems.
In a world of guided surgery and digital implant planning, it is easy to forget that implant dentistry did not arrive fully formed in the UK. It needed advocates, champions, devotees. Eddie was all of these and more – a clinician who adored his craft and shared that passion with others, never losing the wonder over the difference that dental science could make for patients on the receiving end.
He was pivotal in the inception of the Association of Dental Implantology in 1987, helping formalise it from a study club to a UK-wide professional organisation.
Together with its other founding members – Barry Edwards, Vivian Freiberger, Ashok Sethi, Norman Mills and Philip Freiberger – he helped move implant dentistry away from the suspicion that once saw its practitioners dismissed as ‘the cowboys of dentistry’, and towards a field increasingly defined by training, standards and peer accountability.
Eddie would later serve as ADI president and, in 2013, was made an honorary member – a recognition he regarded as one of the great honours of his professional life.
Birthright and legacy
Dentistry itself was a birthright as much as a calling for Eddie, who was part of a dental lineage that stretched back two generations.
The first signs appeared early: he made his first set of dentures aged 10 in his father’s laboratory. His three uncles were all dentists. His grandfather, Israel Scher, helped found the very dental school – University College Cork – that his father Leslie would go on to be dean of.
Eddie’s later appointment as visiting professor at UCC carried enormous meaning. To him, it was the return of a Scher to Cork – validation and acknowledgment of his own inheritance.
But if he felt the responsibility of his legacy, he shaped his own path. His philosophy was one of putting people first: starting always with the person in the dental chair.
He spoke of the treatment planning conversation as the moment where dentistry became properly human: when the science, the patient’s hopes and the clinician’s responsibility had to meet.
Becoming Professor Eddie Scher
Despite often referring to dentistry as his hobby, his commitment to implant dentistry was serious. It went far beyond institutions and science. For Eddie, the field had to be explained and shared, and that same energy carried him into lecture halls and dental schools around the world.
He founded and led the Osseointegrated Year Course, helping demystify implant dentistry for generations of clinicians at a time when formal pathways were still developing. He also taught extensively in the UK, at University of Salford and the Eastman Dental Institute, but his influence as an educator extended far beyond domestic shores.
His long relationship with Temple University in Philadelphia began in 1994, when he became associate professor in its prosthodontic and implant department, and continued for the rest of his life through a visiting professorship he held dear.
His academic journey took him to France, and to Israel, where advisory and institutional roles with Tel Aviv Dental School and Tel Aviv University carried deep professional and personal significance.
Speaking with purpose
Eddie’s teaching took him across the world, but his purpose remained strikingly consistent: to make complex implant dentistry understandable, responsible and clinically useful.
His long-standing partnership with FMC, publisher of Dentistry, became another extension of that mission, allowing him to bring implant dentistry to a wider audience of general dentists than ever before. As editor-in-chief of Implant Dentistry Today, he brought the same insistence on scientific rigour, clinical relevance and real-world application.
As his involvement with Alpha Omega also grew, he ushered his network of colleagues and alumni into pages and onto stages, gently insisting they too share their expertise with his growing audience.
That gentle insistence could become more forthright when the occasion demanded it. He had a strong sense of justice that appeared early. As a boy, he once lured local bullies onto a garage roof and left them stranded there – a tale that sums up his fighting spirit and the impish humour that never left him.
Many years later, that same refusal to accept unfairness would surface in a very different context, when he challenged the impact of the GDC’s fitness to practise processes on clinicians.
The complaint that took him through that process was found to be baseless; ultimately dismissed with ‘no case to answer’. But the experience left its mark.
No sooner had the dust settled than he set about campaigning on behalf of the others who had experienced the same challenges. Eddie spoke and wrote openly about the fear and uncertainty it caused. He was determined to challenge a process he believed could do profound damage to professionals – and to stop others enduring the same experience.
Loyalty, influence and generosity
If anything remained constant through Eddie’s long career and longer list of titles, it was the irrepressible spirit of that boy whose teachers had once suggested he ‘wouldn’t amount to much’.
A talented sportsman in his youth, he developed an enthusiastic love of golf in later years – one that sustained him even through illness, when he practised putting in his hospital room. New friends were swiftly made among the clinical staff. But then, that was so often the case with Eddie.
Behind the professorships and titles was a man of deep loyalty, fierce family feeling and instinctive generosity. Eddie never simply spoke to people: he took an interest. He remembered families, names, anxieties, ambitions and small details even as he shared the achievements of his own family.
The loss of his first wife, mother to his sons Laurie and Robin, shook the foundations of his life. In Belinda, whom he would later marry and often described with profound gratitude, Eddie found love, steadiness and joy again.
He is survived by Belinda, his sons, and his grandchildren.
Many will remember Professor Eddie Scher as a pioneer of implant dentistry, a teacher of rare influence and a clinician who helped change the course of his field.
Those who knew Eddie will remember something more intimate: his loyalty, his mischief, his pride in the people he loved, his belief in the people he taught, and his ability to make others feel braver than they had before.
A mentor, a teacher and, above all, a friend.
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