A bone graft is a great tool for us to use. It hasn’t been, you know, something that’s always used, so when a tooth comes out, naturally we leave a big hole where the tooth comes out. You know, those roots go deep, and when you remove them, there’s a space there.
The grafting itself fills that space. It’s like taking a tree out of the ground. You take a tree out, all the roots come with it.
We left with a big hole in the ground. It’s like re-soiling a tree. So you get in there, and you pack it back.
So this does a lot of things for us. Number one, if you leave the space empty, it resorbs really fast. The bone itself shrinks in that area, and it shrinks around those teeth.
So you’re losing bone in that area quickly without a graft, and you’re losing bone around the adjacent teeth without a graft. The graft allows us to rebuild the structure before it resorbs quickly like that, and it gives us a place over a couple months of healing that we can predictably come back and put another synthetic root, an implant, in that space that can anchor a tooth that can last the rest of your life.
