Will UK Dentists Fix Turkey Teeth?

It seems that every week, we get an email or a phone call, asking if we can fix some dentistry that was carried out abroad, and there is one country that keeps coming up!

But- its actually, not just dentists abroad, this month, we have had two consultations with people who had work started here, in the UK, and its not gone to plan.

Most dentists don't want anything to do with fixing work started abroad, but we are the opposite in this regard, we will help everyone who we can. (as long as we think we can improve things)

Correcting this work is often complex, and therefore expensive (we will give some examples below), this is often very frustrating, because our patients have paid once, abroad, and there is no way to get any kind of refund on that, and now, there are significant costs to re-do a lot of the work - at UK fees.

What kind of things do we fix?

The types of complications that we see vary a lot. We see many people for dental implant-related problems, as this is what we are more known for.

With dental implants, the problem is often in how the final teeth are, so in these two examples, you can see that there is too much bulk on the inside of the upper teeth, and in the second photo, the all on 4 bridge is completely broken.

In the first case, the patient was happy with the look, and it was a surprise that there was this bulk at the back of the teeth.

His friends had also had this treatment, and they didn't have this bulk.

He tried living with it for a year, and couldn't find anyone who could help him, but I think there is a good chance that we can dramatically improve things for him.

We are going to try and replace the abutments on the dental implants here, and make a new bridge, I think we can improve things, but there is also a problem with the position of the dental implants.

If we can replace the bridge, this is a sub £10,000 fix, but if we need to replace the dental implants, things will get more complex, and more expensive.

Infected Bone Grafts

This is a photo of a bone graft that was carried out abroad so that dental implants can be placed at a later date.

This patient's own dentist knew something was wrong, but they are not experienced in fixing things like this.

What we can see is a membrane that secures the graft in position - this should not be visible.

As soon as this is visible, you can be sure that the graft has got infected and some or all of the graft has been lost.

In this case, we knew something had to be done, and it was quite straightforward, so we removed the graft and the membrane, and we have advised to leave this for 3 months (minimum) so that the area can heal, and then it is up to the patient if he wants to do anything to replace the teeth at that stage.

We did not charge anything (in addition to the assessment fee) so remove this membrane, it took us 10 minutes to do it!

But the worst thing is...

I hope that these things are rare, and I hope that the majority of people who have this treatment get excellent results.

One thing that we see a lot, and none of our patients think is a problem, is the design of the final teeth.

Here you can see what a typical set of teeth from these notorious countries advertising cheap dental care looks like.

When it's in, it is acceptable for the patient, but when its out, you can see how much coverage the gum has, this makes it impossible to clean.

Food will accumulate under the bridge, and it will cause inflammation and bone loss around the dental implants.

This will not hurt, and will probably only become an issue 5+ years down the line.

Let's compare this to a typical bridge that we would make, you can see that the surface next to the gum is a polished (titanium) finish, and it doesn't wrap around the gum, instead, it sits on the gum.

This bridge is designed to be easily cleaned, and we give detailed instructions on how it can be cleaned to each patient because we know how important good cleaning around the bridges is.