10:20am Friday 28th November 2008
Frightened by the cost of cosmetic dentistry? Why not jump on a plane? Health Editor Barry Nelson talks to one North-East patient who made huge savings having his teeth done abroad.
ALAN, a heating engineer from Darlington, was feeling pretty low. In his early 50s and not blessed with the best of teeth, he was fed up with apparently endless trips to the dentist.
In fact, he was so ashamed of his uneven, greying and crumbling teeth that he began to feel embarrassed about smiling.
Wasn’t there something he could do to fill the gaps, straighten them up and get his teeth looking whiter?
Alan was warned that the kind of remedial work he had in mind, dental implants and expensive bridgework, would be very pricey – think buying a new car rather than a packet of dental floss. An exploratory trip to a private dentist in the Darlington area shocked him to the core. “I went to this guy and asked for a few quotes.
It was an absolute fortune. They said it would cost me £2,500 just for one implant,”
he recalls.
Alan, who is married and has two teenage children, decided to surf the net to see if he could come up with a more affordable alternative. “I had heard about people from England going abroad to have their teeth fixed, but I was a bit worried in case I picked the wrong people and ended up with problems.”
After looking at quite a few different websites he decided to try Smile Savers Hungary, a UK-based company which has links with a number of dentists based in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
Hungary is actually the number one destination for the increasing number of Britons who travel abroad for dental work, followed by Poland, then Turkey.
ACCORDING to the medical tourism website Treatment Abroad, last year, 45,000 people travelled from Britain to have dental treatment overseas, up from the previous year’s total of 30,000, and the satisfaction rate is an impressive 91.2 per cent.
However, the British Dental Association does advise caution after a number of their members reported having to do remedial work after a patient had treatment abroad.
Smile Savers say they work with Hungarian dentists because they have a large number of highly trained dentists serving a relatively small domestic market. This means Hungarian dentists are always looking to work with foreign clients, who are attracted by high-quality work at bargain basement prices. Initially, since the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, most of their clients came from neighbouring Austria and Hungary, but in recent years this has included clients from all over Europe.
“I was looking for the best deal, but you also want the job doing right,”
says Alan. To check out the facilities in Hungary, Alan decided to go and see for himself and took a low-cost flight to Budapest. A car picked him up at the airport and whisked him to the well-equipped surgery.
Alan was very impressed.
“I reckoned I must be born lucky.
You do hear stories of people going abroad for treatment and having problems, but it looked like a really good one.”
While he was being shown around by the English-speaking staff, he met another Brit, a well-dressed Londoner, who told him she had done lots of research before choosing the Implant and Aesthetic Centre out of a number of different Hungarian surgeries.
Back in the North-East, Alan decided to take the plunge – especially after he was told that any work would roughly cost about a third of private treatment in the UK.
Using a low-cost airline, Alan flew back to Budapest to begin what would be an extensive course of treatment to dramatically improve his dental health. The initial trip lasted four days; the second ten.
All Smile Savers clients are put up in either a hotel or an apartment during their stay. “I went thinking I would have three implants but ended up having two. I also had quite a lot of bridgework, my teeth straightened and whitened as well,” he recalls.
Because the first stage in installing implants involves drilling down into the jawbone and putting in metal sockets, Alan made two trips to Hungary during his course of treatment.
“After they have put the sockets in you have to wait three months before you go back again, to let your mouth settle down properly,” he says.
All in all, Alan is now very happy with his new-look teeth. “I would definitely recommend it.”
The total cost of his treatment in Hungary was £4,800, which included airport transfers and accommodation, initially a hotel and then an apartment. Alan reckons the same treatment in the UK would have set him back around £15,000.
“We know from what our members tell us that a number of patients appear to be going overseas for dental treatment. They also report cases of carrying out remedial work to address problems that have occurred as a result of these trips,” says a spokesperson for the British Dental Association.
“While travelling abroad may appear to be a cheaper way to receive private dental treatments, difficulties can arise if there are problems with the treatment when the patient returns home. Anyone thinking about having dental treatment overseas must make sure that they are aware of the potential risks and the hidden costs.”
But Alan is happy with the outcome… and glad he checked with Smile Savers exactly where in Hungary he was flying to. Admitting his knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe is not 100 per cent, Alan actually booked a flight to Prague in the Czech Republic before realising he needed to fly to Budapest.
But with the savings he’s made, he says he can afford to smile about his error.
■ PEOPLE suffering from swelling and excessive fluid build-up could benefit from the appointment of a new lymphoedema therapist.
Julie Stephens is working at the Pioneering Care Centre, Newton Aycliffe, having trained as a lymphoedema and chronic oedema practitioner in Europe. Mrs Stephens said more than 100,000 people in the UK are affected by oedema in the UK and that a treatment known as manual lymphatic drainage (MLD) is effective but often overlooked.
She says: “Many conditions benefit from MLD, such as rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia and pre or post operation swelling. Particularly after breast cancer surgery or radiotherapy to the pelvis.”
The treatment of thread veins, on the face or on other parts of the body, is also on offer. More information on 01325-321234.
■ LEMSIP Max All in One has conducted a study into sympathy levels towards sickness. The results revealed that, contrary to popular belief, men are far more sympathetic than women when their partner is ill. In Country Durham, 70 per cent of men are sympathetic towards their partner, whereas 52 per cent of women say genuine sympathy towards their ailing partner only lasts five minutes.
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