Dentists say they all too often have to pick up the pieces when New Zealanders travel overseas for dental treatment.
Photo: 123RF
A 2016 University of Otago survey of 337 New Zealand dentists found 96 percent had seen one or two patients each year who’d travelled overseas for dental work – usually because they required remedial treatment.
One who responded to the survey said they’d seen a patient in pain after receiving a mouth full of new crowns and bridges.
“I wasn’t prepared to treat the patient as the quality of work was absolutely appalling. The dentition had been absolutely wrecked and I wanted nothing to do with it,” the dentist reported.
“Patients are often over-treated and inappropriately treated with irreversible damage to their teeth and no apparent discussion or awareness of treatment options,” said another.
People most often travel to Thailand for the work, says Karl Lyons from the University of Otago Faculty of Dentistry.
“Some patients will get very good treatment and others don’t – and the problem that they have is that they just don’t know when they go over there whether they’ll get good treatment or not.”
Crowns and caps, repairing missing teeth with bridges, and dental implants were the most common treatments, according to the survey, but when problems arose, records were often lacking.
The cost of dental work in New Zealand is a factor driving people overseas – treatment abroad is cheaper and people can enjoy a holiday at the same time.
To go some way towards addressing high costs in this country, the NZ Dental Association supports free dental days, Lyons says. Run over the past few years, dentists set aside a day o provide free treatment for people with Community Cards.
