Receding gums usually meant a graft, which involved cutting tissue from the roof of your mouth and stitching it into place. The pinhole technique offers a less invasive alternative for the right candidates.
It's a suture-free, scalpel-free way to treat receding gums, without taking donor tissue from your palate. Through small pinholes in the gum, special instruments gently loosen the gum tissue off the jawbone. That tissue is then eased up over the exposed root and held in place by tucking small collagen strips into the pinholes.
Recovery isn't necessarily faster, since there's no brushing the treated area for about six weeks, but it can be more comfortable, because there's only one site healing instead of two. The pinholes themselves usually close within 24 to 48 hours. There's also a scale advantage: a traditional graft is limited by how much tissue can be taken from the palate, so only two or three teeth can usually be treated at once, while the pinhole technique can do the upper and lower arch in a single session. Whether you're a candidate depends on the type and extent of your recession, which is assessed before anything is scheduled.