A visit to the dentist

wellworn

I had a filling done with a dentist a few months ago who I never used before then recently got a pain in the side of my head that
drove me insane, so I went back to the same dentist who said I had an abscess in it and the tooth needed to be extracted. I got quite shocked and asked if anything could be done to save it, to which he bluntly said "no". At that point I didn't know what a root canal was. From the outside the tooth looked fine, it may well have been beyond repair but I would have liked a second opinion if I had known about other options.

Now to the extraction, while it was relatively quick it was far from painless apart from the dentist pulling down on my jaw in what seemed to be trying to find its breaking point, he didn't give me enough anesthetic and when he started to pull it out I let out a bit of a scream to which he angrily said to me (this is a direct quote) "what are you complaing about". After telling him I could still feel it and when he went off to get more anesthetic I'm fairly sure he muttered "fcuk sake" to himself.

When it was finished he just shoved a gauze into my mouth and sent me into a little office with the nurse. At this point I was pretty tense and stressed out about everything, the nurse (who was also the receptionist answering the phone etc.) who was pleasant enough took my money and gave me some aftercare advise. Now to exit the office and out of the surgery, you have to walk right past the dental chair which means patients could happily look at me while I was getting the sh1t beaten out of me as they were passing through. And I got to look at some poor woman sprawled out on it with the dentist looking into her mouth as I was leaving. Also the walls between the waiting room and the surgery are paper thin and any word spoken in the surgery can clearly be heard in the waiting room. I never noticed this before as it wasn't as busy when I went first.

Maybe I caught him on a bad day but whatever about his attitude (which was very poor) having patients walk around each other while they are having work done is completely unacceptable IMO and I would like to complain to whoever is over dentists in Ireland about it, I'm hoping somebody can point me in the right direction.

My teeth were always pretty good and now there is a big hole in them which drives me mad every time I eat or roll my tongue around my mouth. I just want my teeth back to feel how they were, if anybody has any recommendations of who the best for implants are in Ireland please let me know. At this point I don't care about cost, I'll deal with it later.

Cheers.

btkm8unsl0w5r4

Sound like you had a bad time, that a real shame. Where in the country are you?

wellworn

I'm in Leinster, I don't want to be more specific until I have lodged an official complaint.

The more I think about it, the angrier I get. If when I asked about saving the tooth he could have said something like; "under normal circumstances we could do a root canal to try save it, I personally feel it won't be successful and it would need to be extracted anyway, however you're welcome to get a second opinion elsewhere." I would have felt he had my best interests at heart and made my own decision instead of trying to make me feel like a piece of crap who inconvenienced his day.

I don't want to come off as throwing a tantrum because mean mister dentist took my toothy woothy. A decade into the 21 century in Ireland, I would hope for my health care professionals to offer me a basic level of human compassion and a reasonable level of privacy, in fact for the money I paid in this case it's the least I should be entitled to.

I'm not looking for any pay off or any compensation whatsoever, nor am I looking for the dentist to face any disciplinary action. The ideal outcome for me would be if somebody from the HSE (or whoever is over dentists in Ireland) paid a visit to his practice saw the state of it and forced him to make changes to it, which would only take a couple of days. He might then feel the HSE takes complaints seriously and make him think twice about treating any of his patients like something he stepped in. It doesn't cost a penny to be polite.