. For those less keen on sticking strong adhesives in their mouth than John, temporary filling kits are widely touted as a solution to lost caps and loose crowns. The kits retail for as little as £5 at Boots and were lifesavers for many during the pandemic when non-urgent dental work was not possible. One woman says she tried this approach when her bridge fell out. Her dentist had retired and she couldn't see a new one. The emergency kit worked and has held up, easing pain and sensitivity too. But they are not a long-term replacement for seeing a professional. Eddie Crouch, 63, who chairs the BDA and enjoyed a 39-year career as a dentist in Birmingham, describes the kits as a 'stop gap'. 'Say if you're going away for the weekend and you lose a filling on the Friday and you have a sharp tooth edge exposed, they are perfect just to get you through until seeing a dentist on the Monday,' he says. 'But they are not a long-term solution because it won't help to just keep replacing temporary filler every week.' According to those who work in dentistry, the issue with trying to fix problems yourself is that these home treatments can easily cause more issues than they solve. 'The real problems are that if it is a method of just delaying the treatment – which in most cases it is if you're patching up teeth or trying to do something to hang on to the tooth – by the time you get seen by a dentist the problem could be unsolvable,' says Crouch. 'If you're taking teeth out with a pair of pliers, you are likely to break the tooth and may end up needing a surgical procedure and you could develop a serious infection if you do a lot of dam){kind=link}
With so few NHS appointments available, many see no option but to take matters into their own hands
It sounds like a scene from a cartoon – where desperate people suffering from toothache often use the piece-of-string-attached-to-the-door method to yank out offending teeth. Yet do-it-yourself emergency dentistry is on the rise as people struggle with a dental health crisis that is making it impossible to get appointments on the NHS.
John, a 58-year-old from London, noticed his molar was wobbling a week before he was due to go on holiday to Greece. “I didn’t have the money or time for an emergency dentist appointment before I went and thought, ‘it’ll probably be alright’,” he says.
“The tooth fell out on day two, but finding a dentist in Greece was even more frightening, so I just bought some superglue and stuck it back in,” he continues. “It would last for a day or two before my saliva dissolved the glue, so I had to keep doing it. The worst thing is I’ve now lost the tooth and implants are out of the question, so I’ve been left with a big gap.”
Only six years ago, the idea of DIY dentistry was so unlikely that Bob Mortimer, the comedian, astonished the panellists of BBC comedy show Would I Lie To You? by saying that for 15 years he had done his own fillings and crown replacements on a gaming chair atop his kitchen island.