How spin down M7 saved me a €4k dental bill

Root canal treatment was sore but not nearly as painful as the extra fees some patients pay city specialists

Ouch! Recently I had root canal treatment, where the nerve is removed from an infected tooth. It sounds dreadful but I’ve had it many times before with no pain whatsoever. But not this time… Every attempt to scrape out the tooth’s nerve was like…well, scraping a nerve.

Repeated injections did not numb the pain. After half an hour, the dentist gave up. She seemed as shaken as I was by the experience and didn’t charge me a cent.

Apparently, inflammation had blocked bloodflow to the infected tooth stopping the anaesthetic from reaching the nerve. It was the worst dental experience of my life.

And for someone who has lived through much of the often-barbaric history of Irish dentistry, that is saying something (see panel, below).

In fairness to the dentist, she’s not an endodontist who specialises in root canal work. She recommended I contact another Dublin practice which specialises in this area.

With this crowd, I had another excruciating experience – and that was just the phone call. They wanted to charge me over €800!

Luckily, I have a fall-back plan whenever I’m confronted with outrageous dental bills: a trip down the N7 to ‘Little Budapest’, in Carlow.

Many people go to Hungary for high-quality dental work at great prices. But why go to Hungary when Hungary can come to you?

The Carlow Dental Centre (CDC) is staffed by Hungarian dentists and endodontists who, I can personally testify, are highly qualified and very professional. They painlessly dealt with my root canal. Thank you Tamas and Aniko! The bill was relatively pain-free: root canal work is €290 to €490 depending on whether it’s a front tooth, pre-molar or molar. That’s a fraction of the €800 I was quoted in Dublin.

You can get root-canal work done cheaper than that. Prices have actually plummeted in Dublin. A new chain – MyDental.ie – claims to offer the cheapest prices in Ireland or the UK. Its price for a premolar root canal is €440. That’s good value, but not quite as cheap as the CDC’s €390 fee for this type of tooth.

All in all, I’ve saved over €4,000 in five years by nipping down the M7 to Carlow every time I needed some pricey dental work done. The total savings were on four implants, five crowns and two root canals – all done painlessly and without subsequent problems.

However, recently Mydental.ie – with clinics in Ballsbridge and Cherrywood, Dublin – has thrown down the gauntlet with generally lower prices than Carlow. Most practices still charge way more than either CDC or My Dental, so the point remains: you can save thousands by shopping around.

What hit a nerve for me recently was the dark warnings about overseas specialists from the Irish dental establishment.

Hungary is a world leader in dental tourism with a 42% share in Europe and 21% worldwide. Many visitors are Germans and Austrians, used to high standards. How many travel to Ireland for the value and quality of our dentistry?

The Irish Dental Association has released a survey claiming thousands have sought help from Irish dentists after botched treatment in Hungary. It also expressed concern about the opening of a Hungarian clinic in Limerick.

This did not go down well in Budapest. ‘The opinions of the overwhelming majority of satisfied patients who received dental treatment in Budapest would certainly give a fairer reflection of the truth rather than the opinions of the narrow base of their own, possibly biased, members on whom they depended for their results,’ stated Budapestdentists.com.

However, chief executive Fintan

Hourihan insists he ‘would never cast aspersions on Hungarian dentists as a group’. Many of those in practice here are members of the association, which has seen ‘a significant increase in the number of foreign-trained dentists’.

He stressed that most Irish people are loyal to their local dentists, sticking with them for an average of 10.5 years. But as a nation we have benefited hugely from the influx of overseas talent already trained in implant and root-canal work.

Ireland has become a rich country relatively recently and we can now afford high-end treatments to save our teeth. This has created a demand for specialist treatments, for which there weren’t enough trained dentists here to carry out.

Overseas-trained dentists make up most of the staff at CDC, MyDental and other progressive clinics. They offer treatment at increasingly competitive rates.

Thanks to them, unlike our predecessors, we shouldn’t ever have to plop our dentures into a glass of water before giving a toothless goodnight kiss to our partners!