Podcasts · Dental Leaders Podcast

#365 Zero Bone Loss — Raid Ali

21 Oct 2026 · 1 h 42 min

Raid Ali arrived in Cardiff in 1998 because a friend told him it was cheaper than London, and never really left. He joins Payman as a specialist implantologist and founder of Restore Dental Group, a five-practice business built from the three practices he and two business partners bought from their old boss, having qualified in Baghdad in 1996 and sat his exams in the UK with no family connection to dentistry at all.

He talks openly about ranking fourteenth in the whole of Iraq in his final school exams during wartime, about teaching himself English from scratch after arriving (he remembers struggling just to buy bread), and about the early advice from Chris Barrow that changed how he ran his business: stick to dentistry, delegate everything else. There's a genuinely candid account of his own clinical mistakes too, including an implant placed without enough restorative space, and six stressful months defending a legal claim over a mentee's work he wasn't even liable for.

Raid also gets into the detail that's shaped his implant career: why he still refers every zygomatic case elsewhere despite being trained to do them, the French physiologist whose PRF technique changed how he thinks about healing, and why he now considers soft tissue, not implant design, the single most important factor in long-term success.

In This Episode

00:00:50 – Introduction

00:01:50 – Arriving in Cardiff

00:03:50 – Growing up in Baghdad

00:13:45 – Choosing dentistry

00:19:30 – Moving to the UK

00:21:00 – Sitting the exams

00:25:35 – First impressions of UK dentistry

00:28:35 – Buying his first practice

00:35:40 – Getting into implants

00:38:55 – Mentors who changed his thinking

00:50:00 – Advice for new implantologists

01:04:00 – Growing to five practices

01:12:35 – Blackbox thinking

01:24:35 – What grinds his gears

01:38:40 – Fantasy dinner party

About Raid Ali

Raid Ali is a specialist implantologist and founder of Restore Dental Group, a five-practice business based in Cardiff. Originally from Baghdad, he qualified in Iraq before moving to the UK in 1998, and now sits on the board of the Association of Dental Implantology, teaches an 18-day implant diploma, and co-founded the Iraqi Dental Community.

The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)