Intentional Replantation

“So, you want to pull out my tooth and fix it and put it back in? Are you serious?”

This may be the response from a patient when explaining a replantation treatment plan, to which the reply should be, “For decades, physicians have been transplanting organs from human to human or from animal to human, with the fear of rejection. This is not the case with extraction/replantation because the tooth is being returned to its original socket, therefore minimizing the concern of rejection.”

What was once thought of as a procedure of last resort, replantation is a procedure that has been performed successfully for decades, with a success rate just reported in the December 2017 issue of the Journal of Endodontics of 89.1 percent.