Heading overseas for cheap veneers can sometimes turn into a painful and traumatising experience

The pain started as soon as she arrived home. As the anaesthetic from her procedure wore off, Lisa Martyn – back from a week in Turkey and bearing a fresh set of shiny white teeth – found the pain from her gums agonising.

“I nearly went out of my mind,” the 48-year-old says. “I touched down and my mouth was instantly sore. The pain just wasn’t going – in fact it was moving around my mouth, from this tooth to that.” 

The carer from County Kerry, Ireland, travelled to Turkey to get her teeth “fixed” last September. 

Enticed by influencer endorsements and cheap prices, hundreds of thousands of so-called “dental tourists”, like Martyn, flock to overseas clinics every year. 

With parts of the UK experiencing such extreme shortages of NHS dentists that patients are being driven to the private sector – and amid reports last week that one desperate family travelled to Brazil for dental check-ups – it is easy to see the appeal of bargain dental packages in hotspots like Hungary, Poland and Turkey. 

A full set of veneers ranges from £3,000 to £6,000 in Turkey, for example, compared with up to £10,000 in the UK.

The pandemic prompted an increase in demand for cosmetic dentistry, particularly among the over-40s, and the global dental tourism industry is ballooning. It is estimated that the market size will be worth $5.83 billion (£4.69 billion) by 2025.

But while many dental tourists have a seamless experience, some are left devastated by the results of their cut-price treatments.

Martyn had previously had a top row of what she thought were veneers applied by a Turkish clinic in 2011, as she was unhappy with her natural teeth. This first time of receiving treatment abroad, she was happy with the results and suffered minimal pain afterwards. 

However, her problems began when she returned to the same clinic last year after noticing a crack in one of her artificial teeth. 

When she arrived, she was told that it was impossible to replace a single tooth, and that all of them would have to be filed down and replaced, at a cost of £3,500. 

This second round of treatment was a “nightmare”. Having been swiftly X-rayed and ushered into the dentist’s chair, Martyn had 26 teeth filed down to tiny stubs. “I said, ‘They’re very small’, and the dentist said, ‘No, they look fine’ – they didn’t even entertain my concerns,” she recalls.

Once the procedure was over, with her face numb, Martyn paid in cash. She wasn’t given a receipt, and says when she asked for her medical records it was “like you’re asking them for one of their children… I don’t think they want to give you the forms.”

Over the weeks and months that followed, Martyn experienced “crippling” sensitivity, shooting pain in her gums and jaw, and an abscess on the side of her cheek.

She developed an infection, and had to undergo expensive root canal surgery. 

“I went to my dentist in convulsions,” she recalls. Only then was Martyn informed she had a full set of crowns, and not the veneers she had been sold. 

Whereas veneers require some filing of natural teeth beforehand, crowns generally require the entire tooth to be filed down into small pegs – a procedure that can result in complex dental problems.

Eight months later, lingering pain means Martyn is still struggling to eat. “When I went to Turkey I was 18-and-a-half stone, now I’m 15 stone”.

She has accrued hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok videos warning other would-be dental tourists of the dangers involved, but declines to name the clinic that treated her – instead, she says, her experience is part of a “much wider problem” affecting the global industry.

“I just thought, I have to speak out about this… nobody said to me at any stage, we’re going to file your teeth down, so your risk of needing root canals in the future goes up,” she says. 

Martyn has accepted that eventually she will need all her teeth removed and replaced with dentures.

She is still taking painkillers every day, and requires a further in-depth root canal treatment. It will end up costing her more than £1,500 to rectify the effects of her botched treatment.

Another woman, Chloe* in her 20s, also says she has experienced excruciating pain after receiving a full set of crowns in Turkey.

When we speak on Zoom, her dazzlingly white teeth look flawless. But beneath them, her gums are painful and inflamed, and she fears they are harbouring a lifetime of problems. 

The student, who used her savings to pay for the £4,300 treatment in February, said she had wanted minimal-preparation veneers because she was insecure about the appearance of her natural teeth and had seen a glitzy clinic advertised on social media. 

When she arrived at the clinic, she was surprised by its luxurious aesthetic and factory-like efficiency. It was like a “conveyor belt”, she says, with patients streaming in and out. 

There was a lavish coffee bar with free drinks and food, a large garden, and a free chauffeur service to and from her hotel. “I’ve never seen a dentist’s surgery like it before,” she says. “It’s beautiful. But they don’t care about your teeth.”

Despite explicitly asking for the minimal or “no-prep” procedure, which requires little to no shaving of the original tooth, Chloe says “they ended up fully crowning my teeth and completely filing them down to pegs”.

When she looked in the mirror and saw that her natural teeth resembled tiny stumps, she burst into tears. “I was in shock, I was crying so much. Straight away I said ‘I didn’t want my teeth filed down this much’ but they said ‘You weren’t eligible for veneers’. Nobody had told me that.”

Like Martyn, Chloe did not have to sign any forms before the procedure, and wasn’t given a receipt afterwards. 

“I asked for a receipt and she said ‘you can have one if you want to, but you don’t need to’ – but at this point I’d already had my teeth filed down, so there was nothing I could do about it.”

When she returned home, her mouth was in “loads of pain… it was throbbing all over. It was really bad.” 

While the pain has now largely subsided, Chloe’s gums remain sensitive and she is terrified of the dental problems she will experience in the future. “I’m in a really bad place, mentally.”

She is now appealing for a refund, and is afraid that if she publicly names the clinic she visited, they will refuse. 

Chloe attributes the impetus behind young “dental tourists” like herself to the “Instagram effect” – trying to achieve a flawless smile fit for an influencer. 

“It’s just a vanity thing, isn’t it? I know lots of people who have gone to Dubai recently to get their teeth done, but a lot of them are having problems with their gums now,” she adds. 

Martyn agrees. “I have girls myself – I have a 17-year-old, and she’s so conscious of her teeth,” she says. “She said, ‘Mum, should I just go to Turkey?’ and I nearly vomited. I said ‘absolutely not’.”

She adds: “When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t even thinking about my teeth. But these kids are obsessed with everything being perfect. My girls ask me to make an appointment with our dentist like they would with a hair appointment.”

NHS dentist Dr Emi Mawson says that she sees a lot of “really young people” getting their teeth “done” abroad, who don’t realise there is a difference between veneers and the crowns that they are given. 

“The problem with crowns and getting your teeth filed down to pegs, especially healthy teeth, is that you’re really likely to have problems going into the future,” she says.

“If you take a healthy tooth and file it down into a peg, the statistics are that about one in four of those teeth are actually going to die off, and that could cause things like abscesses.” 

Another problem with having cheap treatments done abroad is that if patients return to the UK with problems, they are unlikely to find a dentist willing to treat them, she says. Martyn says she feels fortunate that her dentist in Ireland agreed to treat her, but not all patients have the same luck.

“As dentists here, any treatment we do we’re then responsible for,” Dr Mawson says. “If a patient came to me having had crowns done abroad and now have an abscess, I wouldn’t then be willing to do the root canal treatment on that tooth because… the root canal treatment would be much less likely to be successful.

“I could be penalised for that root canal treatment failing – the only thing I’d be able to offer on the NHS is to take that tooth out.”

“If your treatment is cheaper, corners are being cut somewhere,” she adds. This could include crowns bought in bulk or milled in batches on site rather than custom-made for patients, whereas veneers require more time and skill.

Dr Mawson acknowledges that there are many skilled dentists practising in dental tourism hotspots, but warns that many people – including young people with healthy teeth – are not receiving the necessary information before undergoing invasive procedures. 

Dentist Dr Len D’Cruz, the British Dental Association’s head of indemnity, agrees. He believes many patients receiving treatments like crowns abroad “probably wouldn’t have been given the information they would have [received from a UK dentist] had they been given that same treatment here.”

He adds that such complex procedures, so common in dental tourism hotspots, are often the last resort for UK dentists. “In the UK we very much [practise] what’s called MID – minimal intervention dentistry – trying to keep away from crowns, bridges and so forth until we really have to,” he says.

As dental therapist Laura Bailey points out, “people don’t need 20 crowns to get the perfect smile. There are so many minimally invasive ways that you can get a nice smile.” These include teeth whitening, composite bonding and orthodontics.

For Chloe, hindsight is “a beautiful thing”. She says going abroad to get her teeth done is the biggest regret of her life. “If I could go back now, I would not have had it done – I would have my teeth bleached more and have composite bonding, or I’d save up more money and go to a dentist in the UK.”

Martyn says she wishes she had thought twice beforehand. As she points out: “Once you’ve done this once, there’s no going back.”

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