Turkey Teeth Gone Wrong: What Can Be Fixed, and What Cannot

If you have typed “turkey teeth gone wrong” into your phone tonight, there is a fair chance you are standing in the bathroom with the light on, running your tongue along the edge of something. Here is the calm version from this side of the chair: most of what goes wrong after treatment abroad can be put right, and the part that cannot is far easier to understand in daylight.

So what does “gone wrong” actually mean?

Start with what the teeth are, because everything that follows comes out of that.

“Turkey teeth” is the name that has stuck to full-coverage crowns, which is what most package clinics fit. Each tooth is filed down on every side until it is a small peg, and a porcelain crown is cemented over the top, rather like a thimble slipped over a finger. A veneer is a different thing, a thin shell bonded to the front with a fraction of a millimetre of enamel removed, and composite bonding removes nothing at all. So people describing their Turkey teeth going wrong are usually describing how a crown behaves.

And crowns misbehave in a short, well-known list of ways. Sensitivity that grumbles on and never quite settles. Gums that stay sore right at the crown edges and bleed a little when you brush. A crown that comes loose, sometimes announcing itself in a piece of toast. A chip out of the porcelain, usually on a biting edge. A bite that does not meet the way your own teeth used to, so one tooth touches first and the rest follow. And, later on, a nerve that quietly dies inside a tooth that felt perfectly fine for months.

Now, the honest bit. Those are the things any dentist sees with crowns and veneers wherever they were fitted, including the ones fitted a mile from here. We cannot tell you they happen more often abroad. What we can tell you is what changes when they do: the dentist who did the work is a flight away, and the dentist down the road is starting from scratch with no notes and no idea what the tooth looked like before.

Why does it show up months after the flight home?

Because the nerve and the gum each run on their own clock, and neither of them checks your holiday dates.

Every tooth has a living nerve in a chamber at its centre, and preparing a tooth for a crown means cutting away the outside of it, which brings the work closer to that chamber. The nerve notices. Most of the time it sulks for a few weeks, settles, and goes quiet for good. Sometimes it does not: it stays sharp to cold, or it says nothing for months and then the tooth begins aching on its own, at night, for no reason you can point to. A tooth is a bit like a tree moved in spring that drops its leaves in August; the cause and the consequence sit a long way apart.

Gums take weeks to make up their minds too. Wherever a crown meets tooth there is a join, and the gum sits directly on it. If that join is smooth and easy to clean, the gum tightens around it and forgets it is there. If it is rough, or sits too deep under the gum where a brush cannot reach, plaque settles in and the gum stays puffy and sore. A wound would have closed up long ago. This is a small irritation renewed every single day, which is exactly why it turns up at month three instead of day three. A new bite is the easy one by comparison: it often wants a small adjustment in the first weeks, and here that is a ten-minute appointment.

What can be fixed here, and what does it cost?

Book an examination. We look, take the x-rays that are needed, then tell you what is there and what it would cost to put right. That is the whole appointment, and nobody at this practice is remotely interested in telling you off for going.

From there, most of it is ordinary dentistry. A crown that has come loose but is undamaged, sitting on a sound tooth underneath, often goes straight back on, cleaned up and recemented. That is the small end of the list. A crown that is cracked, or does not fit, or has decay starting under its edge gets remade instead: a new crown from £332.10, prepared at one visit and fitted at the next, with about two weeks in between while the laboratory makes it.

A tooth whose nerve has died under its crown needs a root canal, and that can usually be done through the crown itself. A small access hole through the top, the root cleaned and sealed, the hole filled. Sometimes the crown comes through it unbothered; sometimes it needs replacing afterwards, and you are told which is likely before anything starts. Root canals here run from £550 for a front tooth to £850 for a molar, because a molar has more roots and takes a good deal longer.

Sore gums at the crown edges are usually a cleaning problem before they are anything else, so the hygiene visit does most of that work and shows you how to get floss into a join you have been avoiding precisely because it bleeds. If the edge itself is the trouble, no amount of cleaning settles it, and the crown is remade so the gum has something clean to sit against.

If you are in pain right now rather than reading ahead, do not wait for a check-up slot. The emergency appointment is the same figure as the examination, £27.90, and it exists for exactly this.

One more honest line while we are on money. Repairing work we did not place is charged as new work, because that is what it is. No dentist can take responsibility for work they did not place, and some practices decline the more complicated remedial cases altogether. What you get here is a straight answer about what is possible, and a figure in writing before anyone picks anything up.

What cannot be undone?

The enamel. That is the whole answer, and it is worth saying plainly.

Enamel does not grow back. A tooth filed to a peg for a crown will need a crown for the rest of its life, because there is no longer enough tooth to stand on its own. A crown can be replaced with a better crown, and a veneer with another veneer, but the tooth underneath stays exactly as it was prepared on the day it was prepared.

Please do not read that as a disaster sentence. It is a maintenance sentence. Plenty of people live very happily for decades with crowned front teeth, eat what they like and never give it a thought. The thing to know is that the permanent decision was made on preparation day, and every plan from here starts with the tooth as it now is.

How long do Turkey teeth last?

Crowns anywhere last around ten to fifteen years before they need replacing, and plenty last considerably longer. Porcelain veneers sit in the same range. It has very little to do with the country and a great deal to do with what ends them, which is nearly always decay creeping under an edge or a crack in the tooth beneath. Both are slow, both are silent for a while, and both are the sort of thing a check-up catches early while it is still a small job. What shortens them is the list that damages natural teeth as well: grinding, biting hard things, and gums left uncleaned around the edges.

The arithmetic matters most if you were young when you had it done. Someone who has a full set of crowns fitted at twenty-five can reasonably expect to replace that set several times over a lifetime, and each replacement costs money wherever in the world it happens. None of that needs panicking over if it is already done. Knowing the number before the first set goes in is the useful part.

What about all those “gone wrong” pictures?

Search for turkey teeth gone wrong pictures and you will find a great many of them. We are not going to add to the pile. Photographs of other people’s teeth, with no x-rays, no bite, no history and no idea what those teeth looked like beforehand, genuinely cannot tell you anything about your own mouth. They are very good at making you anxious and useless at making you informed, which is an unfortunate combination at midnight.

The same goes, gently, for before and after photographs, including the ones in our own galleries. An “after” shows the work when it is new, before the gums have had their say. It is a photograph of a beginning. No picture of new work can tell you about year eight, anywhere, for anyone.

What does tell you something is someone looking at your teeth, with x-rays. An x-ray shows what a camera physically cannot: how much real tooth is left under each crown, whether the edges sit flush or overhang, and whether decay has slipped in under a margin while everything still looked fine from the front. A dentist and a couple of small films will tell you more about your own situation than a thousand pictures of strangers, and you can ask them questions.

If the flight is not booked yet

None of this is an argument that going abroad is a mistake. Plenty of people go, come back delighted, and never need a word of the above.

If you are still deciding, there is one question worth putting to any clinic anywhere, ours included: which of the three are you doing to my teeth, crowns, veneers or bonding? Crowns file the tooth down to a peg. The other two do not. Everything on this page follows from that single answer, and you are entitled to it in plain words before you commit to anything. The fuller picture, what a package includes and leaves out with our prices beside it, is laid out on our Turkey teeth comparison page.

And if you have already been and something is not right, you are very welcome here. Book the examination, and you will leave knowing exactly what you are dealing with.