Ouch! The shocking rise of DIY dentistry
Sales of ‘do your own fillings’ kits are soaring — but there’s a painful price
TaKING a deep breath, Tamara Daniel grabbed a metal nail file, stood in the f ront of the bathroom mirror and got to work. Five minutes of industrious scraping later, the job was done: the chip in her front tooth was no longer visible.
Tamara, an educated 34-year-old book publisher from London, had resorted to her own brand of DIY dentistry after her dentist tried to charge her £500 to put a crown — a tooth shaped cover — over her tooth, which was chipped so minimally that she couldn’t even remember how she had done it.
‘That seemed extortionate and I decided a nail file should be able to sort the problem without the huge expense,’ she says.
and it did, apparently. ‘ Bits of enamel came off in fine particles and after five minutes of painless filing, my tooth was straight again,’ she adds.
Tamara’s actions may sound reckless, but she is one of a growing group who feel they have no choice but to take their oral health into their own hands.
a recent survey revealed an astonishing one-in-five people would attempt to remove a tooth either on their own, or with a friend’s help, rather than see a professional.
almost half of us haven’t seen a dentist in the past two years, with many deciding instead to carry out complex, risky and unorthodox dental work, such as improvised fillings, themselves.
Why? For many, cost is the key factor. a private dentist can charge thousands for routine treatment, while even under the NHS a simple procedure such as a filling costs £51.30 and complex work upwards of £ 200. Then there i s the matter of convenience — finding an available NHS dentist can take months.
Nigel carter OBe, chief executive of the British Dental Health Foundation, warns: ‘ DIY dentistry i s both dangerous and unnecessary. It is all too easy to make the problem worse, which could result in more invasive and expensive treatment, so I urge t hose considering self-treatment to think again.’
YeT filing her tooth wasn’t Tamara’s only foray into dental DIY. after a terrifying experience with a seriously infected and painful molar, she also took matters into her own hands four years later.
‘I went to the emergency dental clinic at the royal London Hospital on a Saturday night, where I was told I needed to have my tooth extracted. My gum was so swollen, the dentist couldn’t inject the anaesthetic into the gum efficiently. It was the most painful thing that has ever happened to me and I was in shock afterwards, with blood dripping from my mouth,’ she says.
Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t in a hurry to return to the dentist when, in august 2010, she felt a cavity in her lower left molar.
‘I tried to get an NHS appointment for two months, but there were no dentists in my area offering them,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t afford to go private and, after what I’d been through, I was suspicious of all dentists.
‘So I went to my chemist and bought a DIY filling set. It seemed like a brilliant way of buying time until I could see a dentist.’
The kits, which can cost as little as £5, contain zinc oxide, which is mixed into a paste and inserted into a cavity to act as a temporary, 48-hour cover while professional help is sought. Tamara used them for five months, topping up the temporary filling every few weeks.
Dr carter warns that a DIY filling may sound like a simple and cheap option, but they should never be used as permanent solution.
‘You will almost certainly have decay in the tooth underneath which needs to be removed by a dentist,’ he warns.
and, s ure e nough, by t he beginning of 2011 Tamara’s tooth had begun to hurt again. ‘The temporary filling slowly began to crumble and i t became painful to eat,’ she says. ‘Luckily, I found an NHS dentist I trusted and had a proper filling put in for about £40.’
ReSearcH
suggests men are twice as l i kely to resort to DIY dentistry, presumably because they are less squeamish, and Tim Pickering is a prime example of this.
Five years ago, he undertook the grisly and dangerous task of extracting a decayed tooth himself, armed only with whisky and a pair of pliers.
Tim, a 40-year- old environmental science student from Lancaster, explains he’d developed a phobia of dentists since having milk teeth extracted as a child. ‘ My dentist promised he’d stop if it hurt but didn’t,’ he recalls. ‘I was terrified.’
as an adult, he would go for years without visiting a dentist. Which is why, in 2010, he decided to take a tooth out himself.
‘I knew it would be more painful this way, but at least I’d be in control,’ says Tim, who initially researched how to extract a tooth online, reading that the ‘correct’ method was to prise a tool underneath the gum to sever the tendon attaching the tooth to his jawbone.
‘I was too squeamish to do that,’ he says. ‘So I used pliers from my bike tool kit to pull it out instead.’
according to Dr carter, tooth extraction is one of the most dangerous DIY procedures.
‘You could fracture your jaw or break the crown of the tooth off, making extracting the root much more difficult,’ he says. ‘If you break your tooth off, you’re opening the nerve chamber, which could lead to an abscess on the remaining root.’
This i s what happened to Tim. He removed the top of his tooth but couldn’t get the root out. ‘af te r - wards the t ooth di dn’t hurt any more than i t had to start with and the remaining enamel eventually wore down to a stump,’ he says.
In March 2013, when he felt a cavity develop in one of his few remaining back teeth, he came across a temporary filling kit online. Tim continued with his DIY filling for two years until last month, by which time he was in agony again.
‘In the end I arrived at a& e at 2am, where I was prescribed codeine,’ he says. Two days later, he got an emergency appointment at a dental hospital to have the tooth extracted.
alistair Pulling, a charity executive and father of two children aged eight and six, used temporary fillings for 18 months because he couldn’t find time to visit the dentist.
‘I was so busy that getting my tooth sorted didn’t seem a priority,’ he says.
alistair, 40, from Dorking, Surrey, chipped one of his back molars while opening a bottle of beer with his teeth when he was 20, but it didn’t bother him until the beginning of 2010. ‘I don’t know if it had decayed or I’d bitten into something sharp,’ he says. ‘But suddenly the pain was constant.’
Four days later, alistair went to a dentist, who told him he needed both r oot c anal treatment and a crown — but that it wasn’t available on the NHS and he would have to pay several hundred pounds for a dentist to do it privately.
In fact, his dentist was in breach of contract — a patient i s entitled to receive any treatment necessary to keep their teeth in good condition on the NHS. But alistair didn’t know that.
‘I didn’t have hundreds of pounds, so I decided to sort out the problem myself,’ he says.
He used a temporary filling kit to make an entire crown, or replica tooth. ‘It felt gritty and because it was grey, it wasn’t attractive,’ he admits. alistair’s DIY crown wore off every three we ek s . So he topped it up again. and again. ‘My tooth still felt s e nsi ti v e to hot and cold drinks,’ he says. ‘But with a young family and a highly pressurised career, finding a dentist seemed like too much trouble.’ after f i ve months, alistair put superglue on top of his crown to try to make it last longer.
‘I thought it would create an extra seal,’ he says. ‘Superglue was originally used to bond wounds in a medical emergency so even though it didn’t really work, I knew it was safe.’
But Dr carter begs to differ: ‘You can’t be sure that you’re not putting something toxic in your mouth.’
alistair persevered with DIY dentistry until august 2011 when he switched jobs, finally found time to make an appointment with a new dentist and discovered he was entitled to root canal work and a crown on the NHS after all.
‘They would have been a bit ambitious for a DIY project,’ concedes alistair, who now goes for annual check-ups.
‘I’m angry that I was lied to, but my handiwork managed to get me through 18 months. I can understand why people are turning to DIY dentistry given the time it takes to get an appointment and the costs involved. But, ultimately, it is best to see a decent dentist.’