Pulling teeth a usual occurrence in Britain
Dental service has too few public dentists British dental services are overcrowded
ROCHDALE, England - It is easy to be mean about British teeth.
Mike Myers' mouth is a joke in itself in the "Austin Powers" movies. In a "Simpsons" episode, dentalphobic children are shown "The Big Book of British Smiles," cautionary photographs of hideously snaggletoothed Britons. In Mexico, protruding, discolored and generally unfortunate teeth are known as "dientes de ingles."
But the problem is serious: Britain's state-financed dental service has too few public dentists for too many people. At the beginning of the year, just 49 percent of the adults and 63 percent of the children in England and Wales were registered with public dentists.
Since moving to Rochdale, a working-class suburb of Manchester, William Kelly, 43, said he has been unable to find a National Health Service dentist willing to take him on. Every time he has tried to sign up, lining up with hundreds of others from the ranks of the desperate and the hurting - "I've seen people with bleeding gums where they've ripped their teeth out," he said grimly - he has arrived too late and missed the cutoff.
"You could argue that Britain has not seen lines like this since World War II," said Mark Pritchard, a member of Parliament who represents part of Shropshire, where the situation is similar.
Many dentists, discouraged by what they say is the assembly-line nature of the job and by a new contract that pays them to perform a set number of "units of dental activity" per year, are abandoning the National Health Service for private practice. Some 2,000 in April alone left the national service for private practice, the British Dental Association said.
The system, critics say, encourages state dentists to see too many patients in too short a time and to cut corners by, for instance, extracting teeth rather than performing root canals.
Claire Dacey, a nurse for a private dentist, said that when she worked in the National Health Service one dentist in the practice performed cleanings in five minutes flat.
Some people seek treatment abroad: "I saw it on the Internet," said Josie Johnson, 42, of London, describing how she heard about a company called Vital Europe, which offers dental-and-vacation packages to Hungary. "It's a quite small country, and I thought, they specialize in dentistry - so that's what I might do."
Others do it themselves.
"I snapped it out myself," said Kelly, describing his most recent dental procedure, the autoextraction of one of his upper teeth. Kelly said he had last visited a dentist six years ago, in Sussex.
Sales of dental emergency supplies, including materials that allow people to replace lost fillings, treat gum pain or reattach cracked crowns, are soaring.
A recent Guardian newspaper article about the company titled "D.I.Y. Dentistry" (meaning Do It Yourself) said that the previous week British drugstores had sold 6,000 jars of the filling replacement, and 6,000 of the crown-and-cap replacement.