Woman in agony pulls out own tooth and finds £2 replacement online

When Helen Sheen’s dentist closed in 2020, she could not find another one nearby that would take her on. Soon afterwards, one of her teeth started to come loose soon after and she decided to yank it out using some pliers and a plaster.

Ms Sheen,  from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, said this left her with a big gap in her bottom row, which she decided to tend to with glue and a fake tooth she bought from Wish, an e-commerce platform.

Speaking to Yorkshire Live, Ms Sheen said: “I have bleeding gums every time I clean my teeth and it’s making me not want to clean them as I hate the taste of blood and all my teeth are getting wobbly.

“One in front was so wobbly it had to come out as I couldn’t eat with it so I put Elastoplast on the end of the pliers and tugged it out.

“The only thing I could think of was melting glue and moulding it into the gap.

“It’s working okay, I can actually smile without seeing a gap.”

Ms Sheen’s case is one of thousands that highlight the current lack of NHS dentists across the country.

The British Dental Association (BDA) says more than 38 million appointments have been lost since lockdown, and oral health inequality is set to widen.

The unprecedented backlog has left dentistry “hanging by a thread” it has said, with many dentists looking to change careers or seeking early retirement.

On January 25, NHS England pledged an extra £50 million for dentists to provide additional urgent care for NHS patients.

Funding will be available until the end of March and will be paid on a sessional basis.

“Any additional funding is long overdue recognition of the huge backlogs facing NHS dentistry,” said General Dental Practice Committee Chair Shawn Charlwood.

“After a decade of cuts a cash-starved service risks being offered money that can’t be spent. Hard-pressed practices are working against the clock, and many will struggle to find capacity ahead of April for this investment to make a difference.

“Until today not a penny of the government’s multi-billion-pound catch-up programme had reached dentistry. This is progress but must be just the start if we are to rebuild a service millions depend on.”