Britons are pulling out their own teeth with pliers because of the UK’s ever worsening National Health Service (NHS) dental crisis. This is reported by the Daily Mail.
According to Briton Jamie Totterdell, he has had to extract his own teeth several times, as he has been unable to get an appointment at a public clinic for the past 16 years, and could not afford private treatment, although he could pay for check-ups. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme.
Totterdell, he said, had only managed to get to an NHS dentist once – this was after a not-so-successful routine tooth extraction on his own.
“I had to go to the dentist after one extraction because I’d left [bits of] tooth in there. They had to do an operation to fix it,” he said.
British Dental Association (BDA) chief executive Eddie Crouch said he was being contacted every week by people forced to carry out dental procedures themselves amid problems with appointments. He warned that Britons were risking their lives because of complications that could arise if an extraction failed.
“People hope they can do it properly but obviously by sticking pliers in their mouth, they can’t see what they’re doing, they end up breaking the tooth, leaving a root that can be very badly infected. Unfortunately, we’ve seen people with severe infections that have almost gone into septicaemia. What can happen is shocking,” emphasized Crouch.
According to him, some Britons are also using superglue to repair broken teeth. Some clinics contacted by GMB had a five-year waiting list for NHS patients. Some desperate patients are forced to sit in giant queues from 4am to get an appointment, while others travel to warring Ukraine where dental services are cheaper, he said.
“GMB approached 100 dentists from 10 regions across England to find out about the availability of NHS and private appointments. This survey was a repeat of a similar survey conducted by GMB in 2016. Back then, all 10 regions had dentists who could offer NHS appointments. But in the latest survey, only three regions had this option. Overall, only 1 per cent of the dentists surveyed could offer NHS appointments, which is significantly less than in 2016 (13 per cent),” the English newspaper wrote.
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