Bone Graft

The way I got involved in more advanced grafting was I used to take a tooth out and then wait for it to heal. And it would leave a big indentation. And then, sometimes the patient was not a candidate for an implant. So over the course of my years of training, I realized that, if you remove a tooth, you should graft that socket. That's how the grafting started in our practice. It allows me to offer the patient an implant after they heal. In this practice we draw a couple of vials of blood. We use a centrifuge to spin down and use the healing portions of their blood to place in the socket, along with some artificial grafting material. And then, we do post-ops weekly to make sure they're healing properly. And it's a really, really good service to our patients to avoid grafting later. We have a soft tissue management program that's headed by Dr. Mary Ann. And she makes sure that the patients are fully educated on how to take care of their teeth so that their post-operative healing is much better because their bacterial counts are down. Generally takes about a week to heal from the bone grafting procedure.