Atraumatic Extractions

There is a lot of hype these days in regards to achieving atraumatic extractions. This hype is largely related to the desire to preserve bone for dental implants.

The procedure of placing dental implants is to replace damaged or missing teeth (i.e., bad teeth) with artificial teeth that function and appear like a real tooth. Dental implants offer an alternative to dentures or bridgework that may not always fit as well in the patient’s mouth. Dental implants are surgically placed in your jawbone and serve as the roots of missing bad teeth.

Over the last decade or so there has been a great interest in atraumatic extractions, which is attributable largely to the desire for dentists wanting to do immediate dental implant placement. Atraumatic extractions are desired more and more to preserve bone for immediate implant placement. In general, the benefit of dental implants is solid support for the patient’s new teeth, which requires the bone around the dental implant to heal. Depending on how the tooth extraction is performed, the healing time required can vary greatly, hence the desire to perform an atraumatic extraction.

Once of the many benefits of the Physics Forceps is that it allows for the preservation of the buccal bone and cortical plate – i.e., no laying flaps or removing bone to access roots, hence less healing time needed in connection with implant placement. The Physics Forceps have been incorporated into many dental implant courses today due to this benefit.

A perfect example can be demonstrated in these pictures provided by Dr. Ara Nazarian, which show a tooth that has no crown, cut-down to the gumline, where conventional dental extraction forceps would have nothing to grasp onto and would require surgery, laying a flap, removing bone to perform this tooth extraction. As depicted in these clinical photos, this difficult tooth extraction was performed with the Physics Forceps without removing bone, in an atraumatic manner, and performed very efficiently in a couple minutes, which is necessary for tooth implant placement.

An increasingly common strategy to preserve bone and reduce treatment times includes the placement of a dental implant into a recent tooth extraction site. Also, immediate loading is becoming more common as success rates for this procedure are much more acceptable. Immediate placement can eliminate months off treatment time and in some cases a prosthetic tooth can be attached to the tooth implants at the same time as the surgery to place the dental implants.

There is data that suggests when placed into a single rooted tooth sites with healthy bone and mucosa around them, the success rates are generally comparable to that of delayed procedures with no additional complications. The Physics Forceps are being used today by many dentists placing tooth implants due to this benefit. The Physics Forceps are also discussed in several dental implant courses by industry leaders.