Bone Preservation
Sometimes a patient has a tooth that can’t be saved. This may be because of extreme decay or other dental issues.
The perfect solution to this problem is replacement with a dental implant after the tooth is extracted.
There are occasions, however, when the implant cannot be placed during the same procedure as the tooth extraction.
When this happens, we perform a simple procedure called bone preservation.
When a tooth is removed and not replaced with an implant, the bone will literally melt away. Within 6 months of the extraction, 50% of the bone width can be lost. Before the bone has a chance to shrink (making it much harder to place an implant), we preserve your bone by filling the socket with healthy bone. If this procedure is not performed and the bone is lost, more complex and expensive procedures are needed to regenerate the bone that could have otherwise been saved.
Filling the socket with healthy bone permits our McKinney dentists to place dental implants into the healthy bone once it heals.