With the topic of turkey teeth being a hot topic right now, Manrina Rhode discusses the complications of dental crowns that every patient should be aware of.
Welcome back to part two of the “dark side” of cosmetic dentistry.
And keeping up with porcelain veneers, crowns and smile makeovers and moving on from composite bonding to what many patients will end up with in the future. Obviously,
I don’t know how many of you saw it Turkey teeth documentary I was a part of, a documentary about BBC – it’s still on Iplayer.
It’s a brilliant documentary. I was there as a veneer specialist and it was shocking.
You can see how shocked I am. I go in at 16 minutes and I didn’t know the results until they were rolling. It was just crazy.
This presenter – she is also a dentist and has these beautiful teeth. She sent her photos to all these clinics in Turkey and the number they recommended to her is 20 zirconia crowns!
So they wanted to cut this young dentist, I think she’s 25, with a perfect smile for 20 zirconia crowns.
Recovery coil
In my experience, patients who have come to see me who have gone for these treatments often go to Turkey for discount offers. It could be £2,500 or £4,000 with transport and hotels.
They end up drilling their teeth into pegs. Sometimes they don’t even get temps – they wait a day or two and then they put these crowns on them.
With the work I’ve seen, there’s a large number of root canals that these people needed afterwards with the number of protrusions left. They have developed gum disease or periodontal disease because of the treatment they had.
This is a really serious pandemic in itself.
How long will it be before they go down this recovery spiral and their teeth are no longer restorable?
And then what will happen? Will they pull teeth? If we take the teeth out, what will we replace them with? So again, we’re back.
I often talk about how in my grandparents’ generation, it was quite common for people to have periodontal disease and lose teeth to that disease and end up needing dentures.
I think it’s less common now. Certainly in my parents’ generation, people were better educated, cleaned better and less likely to lose their teeth.
What are we doing?
But I feel like life has taken a turn for the worse as it so often does. And now people go and make these small changes, usually abroad.
This is because we are really highly regulated in the UK so you are less likely to have a treatment plan for 20 zirconia crowns on a perfect mouth in the UK.
But they will do these treatments. And then in their 50s they will lose their teeth. And then what do we do?
Are we going back to dentures? I don’t know that they will be able to afford implant-retained dentures right now – that’s a really expensive treatment for anyone.
These are all things to consider about the dark side of cosmetic dentistry.
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Visit Manrina’s website here: www.drmrlondon.co.uk.
