THE two words that never fail to increase the heartbeat of a prospective dental implant patient are 'bone graft'.
For some reason, bone grafting conjures up all sorts of weird and wonderful images in people's minds, causing anxiety before having it done and often pleasant surprise after the procedure as it tends to be easier than what people imagine.
In 1668, a soldier unwittingly earned a place in the history books after suffering a head injury during a bloody battle. The daring surgeon of the day, Dr Van Meekeren, hit on the idea of using dog bone to plug the gaping hole in the poor man's skull.
The soldier lived, an amazing achievement in itself when considering the rudimentary surgical sanitation levels of the era. However, due to the church excommunicating this hybrid soldier, the man requested that the surgeon remove the canine graft.
The surgeon was amazed to see how well the graft had knitted to the man's bone and was in fact unable to retrieve the graft - a great step forward in surgical concepts was dire for the soldier's religious disposition...
With over 350 years of advancement in technical knowledge since then, bone grafting is now commonplace with predictable outcomes in dentistry, medicine and veterinary.
A missing tooth doesn't just mean that the tooth is absent - the bone and gum that were holding it in have also shrunk away. You can often feel and see a dip in the gum where the tooth used to be housed. So, when it comes to replacing a tooth with an implant (the metal root part under the gum), the bone in many cases also needs to be replenished.
Imagine the implant like a castle - you need a thick moat of bone encircling the implant to help support the implant and make it last as long and look as good as possible, and that's why we often add in bone during implant treatment.
With the innovations in dental anaesthetics and the option of sedation, bone grafting is generally a manageable procedure.
