Depressed about dental work, constant redos and it's cost

paulcam

Hands up I confess I didn't look after my teeth when I was in my 20s and 30s. Then having a nice job I decided to go an get all the work I need done done and take the sedation option as I absolutely hate the dentist and my teeth are very sensitive.

I spent about £1100 mixed between NHS with the £300 treatment cap and sedation. To be honest I was still a little confused as to how it ended up being so much, I had 5 appointments with £90 for sedation, which should have come to £700 or so.

Anyway, 6 months after the work was completed I went back for a check up. In this time two fillings had fallen out and a further was loose. A graduate dentist did my checkup and when I went out to the front desk they handed me a treatment plan, including the sedation for another £800. It included charges for replacing the fillings which clearly were not put in right.

I pretty much ignored it and decided not to bother. But I returned a year later as I had more fillings fall out and a crown was loose. The came up with another serious of work costing over £1000 including sedation. They didn't even look at the loose crown.

I was in the middle of buying a house and while I got half way through the treatment I asked to pause it as I didn't want £200-300 a month disposable incoming disappearing when I came to have my mortgage assessed.

2 months later the crown broke off a bit of the tooth and fell out A week after than a large filling fell out while eating sandwich and cracked the whole side off a good tooth.

Going back to them, they stuck the crown in with some filling material (it has since fallen out again). They said as "things had changed" they would need to reassess and reset the treatment again. Another bill for £900 coming my way. So I complained that the work they were doing kept "undoing" and fillings falling out, work failing, crowns falling out, why do I have to keep paying again and again and again and not getting anywhere.

In fact my teeth are probably worse now in some ways than when I started as when they fill the tooth the hollow it out and when they replace the filling that fell out the bore it out further until the tooth fractures and falls apart. Then they say they want to crown that tooth.

However because I complained the lead dentist did a re-assessment and pretty much abondoned some of my teeth and said they can be extracted and denures provided.

I feel this is just because they don't or can't be bothered doing reliable work on the teeth so in order to avoid me demanding the work be redone for free they will just rip my teeth out and be done with it.

It's really depressing me about having dentures at 45. Both of them will be front teeth. One a "smile tooth" upper left 2 which is the one with the loose crown. I told them it was loose and looking at how it failed it looks like it was only glued to one side of the tooth and had been slowly putting pressure on that bit of the tooth until it broke. It didn't look like there was any adhesive on the post.

Also... never actually explained to me but during complaining I mentioned I couldn't understand why the bills where do high if all I was supposed to be paying was the NHS max £284 + sedation. They only then explained that the NHS will not allow them to mix NHS and private treatments, so they had been putting private items on each bill to justify the private sedation in the treatment plan.

Do I
(a) just accept my teeth are bad and the dentist while doing their best is losing the battle and let them take the two teeth out and charge me a 3rd or 4th time to redo fillings.
(b) Go somewhere else (It'd had to find NHS dentists that will do sedation
(c) Kick up a fuss and report them for many of their failings.

brook2jack

There are several important points here

1 if you do not change the habits of a lifetime you are doomed to keep on having more and larger fillings. Eg if you are having something with sugar in it more than three times a day you will get decay. Do you have sugar in tea, coffee, do you drink energy drinks or smoothies? Do you pick at food in between meals? Do you suck mints or other sweets?

Any tooth that has had work done on it is not as strong as the original tooth and the long term success of dental treatment relies on the changes you make to stop the damage .

2 when you place a filling or crown you need to retain as much healthy tooth as possible , but you need to remove all the decay. When there has been a lot of decay removed the remaining tooth is weak and prone to breaking or the filling coming out , particularly if there is more decay.

3 you need to decide what sort of relationship you want to have with the dentist. If you only want to go when there are problems and can't make the changes necessary to make your dental health better then dentures may be a better way forward.

If you can make the changes and commit to regular check ups and timely intervention when things go wrong then possibly some of your teeth can be saved.

You can be referred , on the NHS, to community dentists who specialise in treating nervous patients and who can give sedation. However waiting lists can be long, in our area 18 months for adult patients. You can ask your dentist to refer you ,even if you are private.

No dental treatment lasts forever , fillings and crowns are less strong than the original tooth. The success rests on how well you look after your oral health.

Toothsmith

Hands up - I confess when I was young I bought a car and loved racing it round a car park in the evening with my mates. donuts, drag race, hand brake turns, we loved it. It was out of the way, so noone complained - but the car became a bit of a wreck.

I took it to the garage where they told me all sorts of things were wrong, so I paid for them to be fixed.

I still like driving fast, and love going hard on the brakes just before a roundabout, then stomping on the gas the other side, and I still see my mates at the car park, but nowhere near as often as I used to.

Then a red light came on on the dashboard, but I was moving house, so ignored it.

When I went back to the garage, it needed new tyres - AGAIN!! some of the parts that were replaced before needed replacing again! What cheap nasty parts & tyres must they be supplying?

They never even looked at the rattling from the back that I'd not told them about.

Another few months on and another rattling and banging is coming from the back, and smoke coming out the exhaust!

Why can't these cowboys just fix my car once and for all???



The above does sound a little bit like someone who doesn't really understand about cars or how car maintenance works doesn't it?

Well - to a dentist reading your post paulcam this is how it reads to us.

The very best thing you had in your mouth was your teeth before stuff started going wrong with them.

Anything a dentist does will always be weaker than healthy tooth, so it will need more care, and better looking after than what you had before.

It will be the fillings that are the weak points, and the heavily restored teeth that break.

The better dentist you find, the better, and if you can find a place where you will be likely to see the same dentist on a more long-term basis (Rather than somewhere where there seems to be a new dentist each time you go) the the better that dentist will get to know your mouth, and plan more for the long term. This is not so likely to be found on the NHS though.

But - as Brook has said above until you realise that it is your habits that need to change, and you need to work in partnership with your dentist to keep things healthy rather than expecting 'job done' each time you hand over the cash - then the more likely you are to suffer repeated failures and more and more work.


(Oh - and I don't have driving habits like that!! That was just for illustration purposes!! )