Sometimes we cannot place an implant right away and we want the body to heal and fill in bone in a defect or the space where a tooth used to occupy. In order to achieve this we must place a bone substitute that acts as physical support and tells the body to fill in that area with its own bone. Otherwise that area can cave in and we can lose up to 50% of the height and width of the space in the first year alone. This makes it much harder to place an implant and we must try to regrow the bone which is more expensive and less predictable.