What’s The Benefit Of Ridge Preservation?

As an oral surgeon, I want to share with you a question I often get asked, “What’s the benefit of doing a ridge preservation?” Well, a ridge preservation is a fancy term for saying a bone graft to keep the ridge from shrinking. When we remove a tooth, the difficulty we have is that we left you with a hole. Simply put, that hole is like a bucket and if we don’t do anything the walls of that bucket are going to collapse and fall in towards itself, therefore making that space smaller and that bone that heals in that area not as strong. By placing a ridge preservation, we’re actually trying to preserve that shape of that ridge. We’re trying to keep the anatomy exactly the way it is by filling in that dead space with a bone graft and that bone graft is working as a space-filler allowing your body the time it needs to fill that area in with its own bone. Three to six months after the ridge preservation the graft material we used should be gone and your bone will have replaced it completely and your body will felt like it needed to have that bone there in the first place. The end result is we end up with a situation where the anatomy in that area hasn’t been compromised and your ability to have options down the road becomes greater and the health of the two teeth adjacent to it aren’t compromised because there isn’t a weak spot between them.