Dental implants abroad: what to check before you book

An arch that costs £12,500 here costs £4,000 to £6,000 in Turkey or Hungary, flights and hotel included. That is not a small difference and it is not a trick. The UK profession’s usual response — a set of horror stories — is neither honest nor useful.

So: most treatment abroad works. Many clinics in Istanbul and Budapest are excellent, better equipped than the UK average, and run by surgeons with volumes no British practice matches. What differs is not typically the skill. It is the structure around the treatment.

Here is what we would want to know before booking, and what we see when it goes wrong.

The questions worth asking about dental implants abroad

Who is placing the implant, and can I see their qualifications? Some clinics are surgeon-led; some are marketing companies that subcontract. Ask for the name and the registration of the person doing the surgery, not the name of the clinic.

Which implant system, and is it available in the UK? This matters more than anything else on the list. There are hundreds of implant brands, and the parts are not interchangeable. If a crown loosens in four years, a UK dentist needs the matching abutment and screwdriver. With a major system — Straumann, Nobel Biocare, Astra, Dentsply — that is straightforward. With an unbranded system, it may be impossible, and the whole implant may have to be removed to solve a loose screw. Get the brand and the exact reference in writing.

How many days am I there, and how many surgical visits? Placing implants and fitting final teeth in a single week means loading implants that have not integrated. Reputable overseas clinics work in two trips several months apart, exactly as a UK clinic would. A one-week complete treatment is the loudest warning sign on this page.

Is my whole mouth being treated, or the part that needs it? The commonest pattern we see is a patient who needed four implants returning with sixteen crowns. Cutting down healthy teeth for veneers or crowns while you are there is irreversible, and it is where a great deal of the profit sits.

What happens if something goes wrong at eighteen months? Get the answer in writing. “Come back and we’ll fix it free” is worth having, and it still means flights, hotel and a week off work for a problem that would be a Tuesday afternoon at home.

Who does my aftercare? No UK dentist is obliged to take on someone else’s implant work, and some decline. Ring a local practice and ask before you travel, not after.

What we see when it fails

We treat these cases regularly and without commentary. Four patterns account for most of them.

Cement left below the gum. Crowns cemented rather than screwed, with excess pushed under the tissue where it cannot be seen. It holds inflammation in place indefinitely and it is entirely preventable. It is the single most common finding on our scans of overseas work.

Implants placed into insufficient bone. Placed where the bone happened to allow rather than where the tooth needed to be, occasionally without a 3D scan at all. These fail late, at two or three years, when the thin outer plate of bone resorbs.

Too many teeth prepared. Sixteen or twenty crowns where four implants were the actual problem. Nothing may fail at all — but a mouthful of prepared teeth in a fifty-year-old is a maintenance commitment for life.

Unidentifiable components. No documentation, no brand, no reference. A loose screw becomes an exploratory procedure.

What putting it right costs

Removal and grafting of a failed implant is around £1,250 here. A replacement implant and crown is £2,450 upwards. Six months of healing between the two.

So a £4,500 arch that develops a problem with two implants can quite easily reach the £12,500 it would have cost to have done here — plus the time, plus the interim of not having teeth. That is the arithmetic worth doing before you book, and it is a risk-weighted calculation rather than a certainty. Most people who go abroad do not end up in that position.

If you are going anyway

Then go well.

Take a copy of your CBCT scan with you. Get the implant brand and reference numbers in writing before you fly home, along with the surgeon’s name. Photograph everything, including the packaging if you can. Arrange your UK aftercare in advance and tell that practice what was placed. And decline anything that was not in the plan you agreed before you travelled — the additional crowns are usually offered on day two, in a chair, in a country where you do not speak the language.

What we will do

Assess it, scan it, tell you what is happening, and treat it if it needs treating. We will not lecture you about having gone. People travel because the price difference is real and because the UK profession has been poor at explaining what its own prices are for — which is why every figure we charge is published on this site.

If you have work from abroad that you are unsure about, a diagnostic assessment with a scan is £95, and it includes checking the implants that are not causing you trouble.