Recover from a Dental Bone Graft
Posted on 12-12-2022 03:30 am
How Long Does It Take to Recover from a Dental Bone Graft?
Today we're talking about healing and bone grafting, and is it painful? Well, bone grafting is really not significantly painful. It's more of extraction of the tooth that causes the pain or if we are doing really significant bone grafting, meaning ridge splits or sinus lifts that can be painful.
And the reason we do that is pain is usually synonymous with inflammation, and dexamethasone cuts down on that inflammation. Many of my patients tell me all the time, 'I almost had no pain' after an implant was placed or a bone graft was done or a tooth was extracted. And the reason is we take our teeth in my office very differently. We use a luxator, which is a blade to create space between the tooth and the root itself. So we do very little bone damage.
Then we pack the wound. I would tell you about 95% of all my extractions have a wound packed with either a synthetic bone grafting material or a human cortical and cancellous bone grafting material. The human cortical can't sell as bone grafting material is better for implant placement.
The synthetic is better for healing, so if you have an immune-compromised patient or you have a patient that's a heavy bleeder or we're getting close to a sinus membrane, the synthetics, in my opinion, do a very, very good job.
The human bone grafting products are also excellent, but they're a little bit more expensive because we are getting them from a bone bank.
In terms of the healing process, all bone takes about three to four months to heal. Unless you're talking about more invasive bone grafting procedures. Once the tissue closes over the wound, the pain that you should have should be almost nonexistent or extremely minimal.
So really, what we deal with is that tissue closure, and that is the most important thing that we deal with after a bone graft is done. But your pain should really not be that significant unless it is a very, very, very invasive procedure where we're splitting bone, we're breaking a bone, and that's where patients start to have a little bit more discomfort.
However, we can provide medications that really mitigate a lot of that, and we can even do it without providing narcotics, which is fantastic today. In the past, we always used to give narcotics to keep people out of pain from invasive procedures.
Now we can give steroids, now we can give over-the-counter medications, or some prescription medications that will really handle that pain for the patient. So they have a positive outlook now in terms of the longest time of bone healing. That's when we get into block grafts or sinus lifts.
Those are much more involved bone grafting procedures. A lot of that is done with an oral surgeon. I will tell you those procedures take about nine months to heal. And the reason is you're talking about a much bigger bone augmentation with either a block of bone that is screwed in and then particulate matter put around it, or we're packing particular matter into a sinus or into a ridge to kind of expand that area.
That can be painful, and it does take a lot longer for it to heal. But on average, most bone grafting procedures heal in about three to four months. On the long scale of things, if it's a very invasive procedure, you're looking at nine months to a year.