The hosts of This Morning, Josie Gibson and Craig Doyle, were rendered speechless after meeting a man who had spent years attempting to register with an NHS dentist before being forced to yank out his own teeth with pliers.
Former Basingstoke roofer Alex Grey said on the ITV breakfast programme that he had been performing his own dental work for ‘approximately seven years’ because he couldn’t get an appointment with an NHS dentist.
It happened when he relocated to a different place after the passing of his prior dentist and was unable to register with a new doctor. He moved to Lincoln to be closer to his family, but he was still unable to locate a dentist who would accept new customers.
This prompted him to pull his own teeth out using pliers from his toolbox, a decision Craig called “gruesome.”
When asked by Josie why he had chosen to start doing his own dental work, he said he had been left with ‘no choice.’
‘I was in so much pain as you can imagine. If you’ve had a toothache, you know what the pain is like,’ he began, detailing the day he removed his first tooth.
‘It got really bad. I tried drinking warm, I tried drinking cold, it didn’t help in fact it made it worse.
‘I tried ringing dentists and in the end, I started to do that with a pair of pliers,’ he continued, gesturing to tugging at his teeth in his mouth.
‘It just made even more pain. So I got my Co-codamol out which I had for my knee. I took four, and I still had the toothache but I started to get a bit dizzy. Then I went to pull it out and it didn’t feel as difficult.’
Since then, he claimed, he has tried to register with a dentist repeatedly, but he recently received word that he can be added to the waiting list and contacted when a spot opens up.
Alex showed his teeth to the hosts, who were left in awe after Josie said that he appeared to still “had a lot of teeth.” He remarked that the reason his teeth seemed to be little was because he had tried to extract them with pliers and they had shattered.
He also astonished Josie and Craig by admitting that the first time he tried to extract a tooth, he really cut his mouth, but he was able to prevent an infection.
In a stinging report on NHS dentistry, the Health and Social Care Committee urged for “urgent and fundamental change” and stated that there was evidence of pain and misery that is “completely unacceptable in the 21st century.”
It uses data from a March 2023 YouGov survey that included 2,104 participants from throughout the UK.
It was discovered that 10% of respondents had tried “DIY dentistry,” with more than half of the group having done so in the previous year. A fifth of the group claimed that they had done so because they were unable to locate a dentist on the NHS.
Additionally, the poll found that 22% of persons were not enrolled with a dentist, with 23% of those claiming that this was due to their inability to pay for care.
Nine out of ten NHS dental offices in the UK, according to a BBC investigation last year, do not take on new adult customers.
The decline in NHS dentistry should be ‘sounding alarm bells’, the committee’s chairman, Steven Brine, said, adding: ‘Today we register in the strongest terms possible our concern for the future of NHS dental services and the patients who desperately need access to them.‘
