The main aim of Senior Times’s visit to Bucharest was to experience first-hand what a top level Romanian dental practice could offer an Irish patient combined with the added bonus of seeing the wonderful historical sights of Bucharest, a city that time has passed by.
First off, the office manager and treatment co-ordinator of the Bucharest British Dental Place is Samantha Teasdale and on hearing her UK English accent we were set at ease from the very start of this adventure. It is a family run dental practice with Samantha’s husband Cosmin Teasdale the founder and dentist overseeing the treatment I was to undergo. Dr Teasdale is a highly qualified dentist who trained and worked in the UK for many years before embarking on this new business venture. He also comes from a generation of dentists as both his father and mother spent their professional lives in dentistry.
Dr Teasdale informed me that a healthy mouth means a healthy you. Our teeth play a vital role not only in how we bite and chew but in how our whole body functions. Incorrectly functioning jaws due to missing teeth, loose fitting dentures or problems with your bite can create problems such as grinding teeth, sunken chin and nose and can affect our whole posture causing our shoulders to slump, our spine to curve and our back to ache.
Dr Teasdale pointed out early on that due to the shortfalls in the dental NHS system in the UK and the raising costs in private practices, patients were either ignoring their problems or taking the cheaper option of extraction due to lack of information or simply because they could not afford to have the most appropriate kind of dental treatment for their situation.
Unfortunately quick fixes may keep the purse strings tight but ultimately they will lead to further problems for the patients overall health further down the road. Because Dr Teasdale wanted high quality dental care to be affordable to all he seized the opportunity to move overseas with his wife and two children and build a practice where he is able to service his patients with the same high quality standards as you would receive in the UK but without the massive UK overheads which the patient has to pay for at the end of their procedure.
He is not only aiming to be ethical in terms of the treatment he advises for the patient but also on how much he charges for performing the treatment. This has allowed him to offer any major dentistry work that would cost in the thousands of euros or pounds in the UK or Ireland at a fraction of the cost. Even when you factor in flights, accommodation and the number of visits required to complete the treatment in Romania the cost is still considerably lower, in most cases 50-70% of the price back home .
Three hour flight
After a quite pleasant flight from Dublin ( approx 3 hours)to Bucharest flying with RyanAir and I was greeted in arrivals at Bucharest International Airport by Samantha who took me by car, in what seemed like minutes, to my hotel in the centre of the city.
The following morning I was collected by her at my hotel and taken directly to the plush surroundings of Bucharest British Dental Place’s private practice in an area similar to London’s Harley St. On arriving in their state or the art facility I was met by Dr Teasdale and the team and introduced to a number of students in their final years of studying dentistry learning their skills all under the watchful eyes of Cosmin.
All the doctors and staff spoke fluent English and I was made to feel completely at home. I underwent an initial examination and was told I required a n extraction, implant and crown on the tooth that had been bothering me for some time now and which I had constantly been patching up with filling after filling.
I was told I had the rest of the day free to discover the city and to return in the morning for my treatment. Usually the practice offers a complimentary day trip to all overseas patients to visit two castles outside of Bucharest but as my trip was too short this time round. Samantha gave me a city map, local mobile phone and recommendations of what to see and where to visit in Bucharest in order to get the most out of my trip and to go home smiling.
However , they say a ‘stitch in time’ saves nine and increasingly more and more studies are showing that many common severe medical problems can be prevented or cured if diagnosed early enough – so what did I have to lose!
I won’t go into the full details but suffice it to say, although I am a little bit afraid of going to the dentist normally, I did go back the following day and I will no longer need to fill a tooth I have filled many times in the past as I am now going to replace the extracted tooth with an implant which will require me to make a second visit in order to finish the treatment. I am happy do this as I will be able to give the readers a progress report in the next issue of Senior Times.
During the treatment itself I was made to feel very at ease and although there was a little discomfort afterwards the procedure itself was painless and the aftercare service received so far has been wonderful, they are constantly monitoring me with regular check-up calls and emails.
A trip to the dentist is not usually an appealing prospect for anyone; after all, no one likes going under the dentist’s drill, and the impact on your wallet afterwards can often be just as painful. The good news is that with Bucharest British Dental Place, while you might still need to undergo root canal work, have implants or replace old fillings or loose fitting dentures you can now do so at considerably less expense, whilst taking in the sights and sounds of one of Europe’s most historic cities! It is true what they say on their website, ‘plan a trip and get your smile back’. That’s exactly what I did and it worked for me!
For further information contact
Bucharest Dental Practice at:
Tel: 00 44 7885 918 386.
Email: office@getyoursmileback.co.uk
www.getyoursmileback.co.uk
Get your smile back
