The seven-year wait for a dentist: why Linda Colla pulled out her own teeth

In chronic pain, unable to find an NHS practice and priced out of private care, Colla – like millions of Britons – felt she had no choice but to take matters into her own hands.

Linda Colla holds an imaginary tooth between her forefinger and thumb and pulls it. Then she adds some rotation. Extracting her own teeth required wiggling and twisting, she explains. “It took me a couple of weeks to get each one out, because they just loosened and loosened and loosened. I used a tissue to get a better grip.”

She points to a front incisor. It was the first to come out. Then a canine and finally a big molar. “It sounds very dramatic, pulling them out. But actually they were already loose,” she says. There was some pain on extraction, but they had been causing her constant pain before that. “It was too painful to eat. They just had to come out.”

In 2018, Colla moved to east Devon. She contacted various dental surgeries and was told either that they didn’t take NHS patients or that they didn’t have the capacity to take any more. 

She went on a waiting list. “I got an email once – or was it a text? – asking if I still wanted to be on the list. I said yes, but I haven’t heard anything since.” She presumes, seven years on, she is still on that list.

To have a tooth removed privately costs at least £150. Colla couldn’t afford that. When her three remaining real teeth became too painful to live with, about three years ago, she felt she had no choice but to take matters into her own hands.

Thirteen million people in England – 28% of the adult population – have an unmet need for dentistry, according to an analysis in July by the British Dental Association (BDA). The number of people on waiting lists for an NHS dentist is estimated to be about 780,000.

When the BDA and the Daily Mirror called up 100 practices listed on nhs.uk as “accepting new patients when availability allows”, they found that 86 were not accepting new patients. Some practices reported a waiting list of up to 10 years. In March 2023, YouGov found that 10% of Britons had carried out their own dental work; 34% of those had pulled out – or tried to pull out – their teeth.

Read full story

Source: The Guardian, 12 February 2025