Gingival Augmentation

Greetings everyone and I hope that you had a wonderful weekend. Summer is over for the most part and now we are into the year-end push. I don't know about you, but it seems that most people base their year based on major holidays or vacations. It's easier to compartmentalize your brain into smaller segments to get your goals accomplished.

Most of you who know me know that I'm a pretty simple person and try to view the world and the tasks of the world that way. You will make fewer mistakes and have fewer troubles if you break everything into small packages. Better organization.

Bear with me, I'll get to the title. Dentistry is no different when it comes to organization. The most efficient and productive offices know that organized systems and procedures make for nicer days, nicer patients, and more productivity.

How does a talk about organization lead to gum grafts? There are a ton of different ways to do grafts, and a lot of reasons to do them. All grafting can be put into one big category which is to make things thicker and stronger. When we have thin tissues, either bone or soft tissue, we have a lot more problems. With thin tissues you will have more inflammation, infection, bone loss, tooth loss, crooked teeth, recession, etc. You all know the problems associated with these issues.

The role of gingival grafting is simply to restore lost structure and prevent further loss. Grafting of gum tissue has been around for a while. And since 1985, root coverage grafting has been achieved successfully. This is important for all of the reasons that were previously mentioned, in addition to successful restorative outcomes and prevention of root decay, which is one of the most common types of decay for your older population.

Grafting of the tissue can be taken from either the palate or a package. In our office we use donor tissue most of the time. In my experience, it works better, is easier to work with, the patient has much less trauma, the matching of tissue is better due to the technique, and the overall experience is less stressful.

That's how it relates to the organization part in the beginning!

So with your patients, look at the gums and recommend grafting. It no longer has to be done the old painful palatal way if it is not necessary.