Thinking about "Turkey teeth"? What UK dentists see when patients come home

Every few weeks someone sits in Dr Alan's chair with a quote from a clinic in Turkey open on their phone. Twenty crowns, a week in Antalya, a fraction of the UK price. Sometimes they want a second opinion before they book. Sometimes they have already been, and something has gone wrong. This guide sets out what the British Dental Association's survey of UK dentists found, what “Turkey teeth” actually involves, and what the alternatives look like for a patient in Stevenage.

What the BDA survey of 1,000 UK dentists found

The British Dental Association surveyed a thousand dentists in the UK about patients who had travelled abroad for treatment. The findings were stark:

• 94% had examined a patient who had been treated abroad
• 86% had treated complications arising from that treatment
• Crowns were the treatment most likely to need remedial work (87% of dentists), followed by implants (85%)
• The most common problems were failed treatment (86%), pain (76%) and poorly executed work (72%)
• Two-thirds said the repair cost the patient at least £500; over half said it cost more than £1,000

Those figures come from dentists, so they see the problems and not the successes. Plenty of people come back from Turkey, Hungary or Poland perfectly happy. But the pattern of what goes wrong is consistent enough that the BDA has published formal guidance on it, and it is worth understanding before you spend several thousand pounds.

What “Turkey teeth” usually means

The phrase has come to mean a full set of crowns, typically twenty to twenty-eight teeth, prepared and fitted in three or four days. To fit a crown, the tooth underneath has to be ground down, sometimes to a small peg. That is irreversible. A healthy tooth that has been prepared for a crown will need a crown for the rest of its life, and crowns do not last forever. Fifteen years is a good run. A 25-year-old with 24 crowns should expect to replace them two or three times.

In the UK, a dentist would very rarely crown a healthy, straight tooth for cosmetic reasons. The conservative options come first: whitening for colour, aligners for position, bonding or veneers for shape. Crowns are for teeth that are broken, heavily filled or root treated. That difference in approach, more than the skill of any individual clinician, is where most of the long-term problems start.

The problems UK dentists see afterwards

• Nerve damage. Aggressive preparation in a short timeframe can inflame or kill the nerve. The result is pain weeks later and a root canal, through a brand-new crown, at UK prices.
• Gum inflammation. Crown margins placed under the gum, or crowns that are slightly too bulky, trap plaque. Red, swollen, bleeding gums around every tooth are a common presentation.
• Bite problems. Twenty-four new surfaces fitted in three days rarely meet perfectly. Jaw ache, headaches and chipped porcelain follow.
• Implants without planning. Implants placed without a CBCT scan, without treating gum disease first, and with no one to see you at three, six and twelve months. Implant failure abroad is difficult and expensive to sort out here.
• No aftercare. The clinic is 2,000 miles away. The warranty, if there is one, requires you to fly back. Your UK dentist did not do the work and has no records of it.

What the same result costs in Stevenage

The comparison people make is usually the wrong one. A quote for twenty crowns abroad is being compared with a quote for twenty crowns here, when the real UK alternative is often no crowns at all. For a patient whose teeth are healthy but discoloured and slightly crooked, the conservative route at Bowling Green looks like this:

• Teeth whitening: £350 for a home kit, £590 in-office
• SureSmile clear aligners to straighten: priced at consultation, typically three to twelve months
• Composite bonding to reshape edges: from £150 per tooth
• Porcelain veneers where a tooth genuinely needs one: from £700 per tooth
• CEREC same-day crowns for teeth that genuinely need crowning: from £600, designed, milled and fitted in one visit

That will usually come to less than a full-mouth package abroad, and it leaves your teeth intact. Where a tooth is missing, a single implant including the crown is £2,300, planned on our in-house 3D CBCT scanner, placed by Dr Alan who has been placing Astra Tech implants for over fifteen years, and reviewed by the same dentist for as long as you are a patient.

If you have already been and something is wrong

We see patients in this situation regularly and there is no judgement attached to it. Book a new patient examination (£81). Dr Alan will take the X-rays needed, and a CBCT scan (from £100) if implants are involved, and give you a written assessment of what is stable, what needs attention and what it will cost. Sometimes the answer is that the work is fine and just needs monitoring. Sometimes it is a single root canal. Occasionally it is more. Either way you will know where you stand.