This has changed dramatically in recent decades as dental implants have slowly but effectively become part of the collective consciousness of practitioners and their patients. Patients are often no longer carefree about what might happen to the socket and are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of bone loss. Although they may not yet be ready for an implant replacement option, they do not want to lose bone and potentially complicate or even shut the door on that option in the future. Thus, it is incredibly important for all general dentists to be able to preserve the socket, no matter their level of surgical comfort or background education.

Under normal circumstances, the removal of a tooth and its stabilizing roots results in an empty socket. Normal healing quickly fills in the socket, but soft tissue always wins the race to replace the missing anatomy, resulting in bone loss in the edentulous area, bone loss to the adjacent teeth, and a collapse of buccal and lingual bone surrounding the socket. If a patient were to decide to place an implant in the future, these deviations in ideal bone contour often create either a surgical or restorative limitation for the dental implant. 

Dentists have been aware of this phenomenon, but many general dentists choose not to preserve the socket because of a consistently agreed upon notion that socket preservation, and grafting in general, is complex, sophisticated, and should generally be relegated to well trained specialized surgeons. This creates a limitation in the standard of care, as patients often just want to have their tooth removed as soon and as simply as possible.