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Dentist has left without telling me

S

scaredycat54

Member
Joined
Dec 18, 2009
Messages
56
Hi, I've not logged on for a while but people were very helpful to me about a year ago when my dentist went private and made it clear he didn't want me around any more. To cut a long story short, I decided to stay regardless and after the initial shock and upset things settled down as normal.

Until today, when I rang for an appointment and got an answerphone message saying that he had closed down due to ill health and because of "untraceable computer error" a very few patients' addresses had been lost and they could not be informed. Oh yeah! Strange how the computer mangled my address.

I feel quite tearful about all this. I had bad phobia problems in my younger days and I have been with this dentist about thirty years or so. I listened to the answerphone three times till it sank in.

I know I have no choice but to find a new dentist now, which is what people advised me to do a year or so ago when my dentist more or less told me to get lost the first time. It just seems incredibly scary, that's all, and I've gone to jelly even thinking about it.
 
Hiya :),
reading your previous posts, this might be a blessing in disguise? He didn't sound as if he was good with anxious people, anyway :(...

Have you had a look at the dentist recommendations on this forum to see if there are any dentists to try in your area? It might be worth googling for dental practices in your area and visiting a few places whose websites you like (or at least not hate, lol).

Of course, the best way of finding a dentist who is good with anxious/phobic people is by way of personal recommendation (friends, acquaintances, family, or colleagues), but the internet has also become a good source of information. Maybe there are also internet forums for your area where you can ask for recommendations.

I really hope you'll be able to find someone you really like and trust :XXLhug:
 
Thank you for your reply. I do have relatives who all go to one particular practice. I was "banned" from that practice as a young girl well over forty years ago because I was too fearful to open my mouth, but it is a different dentist now and I'm sure they don't keep records for that length of time. So I presume it's more or less a new place other than it is where I had awful experiences common to people who were treated in the 1960s (fillings without any anaesthesia and so on).

I also just feel really embarrassed about letting someone new look at my awful mouth and I'm also afraid that they'll want to do extra work on it. My old dentist, for all his faults, never did unnecessary work.

I've had a quick look on the internet and I've not found any personal experience stuff re Nottingham yet. The ads I have seen that offer to treat nervous patients also seem to have a heavy emphasis on cosmetic work, which seems a strange combination. What I need is routine scale and polish plus fillings and crowns as and when things go wrong (about once a year usually), I don't need or afford a beautiful smile and it worries me a bit that maybe these people who advertise are just purely in it for the money and maybe aren't all that sympathetic to nervous patients?
 
There have been some recommendations for Nottingham here:


The "cosmetic dentistry" spiel on websites doesn't necessarily mean very much nowadays and is sometimes driven more by consumer demand rather than by dentist preference. Of course, there are those who genuinely want to "sell dentistry" and quite often you can tell by the website if they're "pushing" cosmetic procedures or just offering them to people who are wanting cosmetic dentistry, anyway.

:)
 
Thank you for the link. I have looked on the NHS website and found that the dentist I had in mind is not accepting NHS patients at the moment so it seems I shall have to look elsewhere in any case, and maybe that is not such a bad thing as I am not too keen on going back to the place I was tormented as a kid (only thing being that they are NHS, which is a good thing).

I shall try and find out more about the practices mentioned on the link. The Mapperley one is not all that far from where I live.
 
Best of luck with your search :thumbsup:!!
 
Best of luck with your search :thumbsup:!!

Thank you so much for the link. I've received a recommendation from another member and I've made an appointment with a dentist for early February. (It could have been sooner but I need time to mentally prepare myself, still shaking from making the phone call.) Luckily I only need a clean and polish at the moment, assuming nothing breaks between now and that date, so it should be a fairly gentle introduction.

I'll let you know how I get on!
 
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