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Turkey has great advantages with its advanced dentistry techniques and treatment offers which are much cheaper than European countries.
Turkey has no grounds to charge the same amount as westerns countries, because of the cost of living, value differences of money in EU vs Turkey, etc. So cheaper doesn’t always mean worse in quality.
Although the treatment costs are already cheaper in Turkey, the rivalry between Turkish clinics causes an even lower pricing contest, just to attract more patients who are coming from abroad.
Europeans, who make the mistake of generalizing the high customer satisfaction of their countries, think that each clinic they contact has similar quality standards. However, these standards can vary widely in developing countries. A very relevant clinic during the sales meeting may not be very relevant when problems arise in the future.
These clinics often market poor quality treatments by luring patients into the cheap price trap. Problems often begin to arise after the patient returns to their home country and things turn into chaos. In order to avoid these problems, as a dentist who has been doing health tourism for 14 years, I recommend you to pay attention to the items I have written below.
1) Planning:
Does it really worth traveling for treatment? It needs more than a photo posted in a Facebook chat to know this. You should get a clear treatment plan and quotation from the dentist who will treat you before you travel.
We've been visiting the UK and Ireland for free assessments for 10 years. This gives us a chance to meet with potential patients and offer appropriate treatment plans. In this way, the patient receives a lot of information before traveling. We also get ready for the planned treatments before they arrive. Of course, we can only make online assessments during the pandemic period. However, after the pandemic, our visits will begin again.
We see that many clinics do not give their patients the chance to be examined in this way or they cannot travel to these countries due to their low quality jobs in the past. From time to time, we help these patients and try to give an idea about how they can solve the faulty work done in the past.
2) Deciding on Travel Dates:
Each clinic has a capacity. Our limit is 6 cosmetic cases per week. If we try to do this 7, we will make 7 failed cases. Therefore, clinics should accept patients according to their capacity, regardless of their earnings.
As a patient, you should try to travel during the less busy weeks. Please be sure to ask how busy the clinic is the week that you travel for treatment.
3) The First Appointment:
When our patient comes to the clinic, if there are weak points in the plan that may cause problems in the future, this should be explained and changes should be made. No risk should be taken, the smoothest planning should be implemented. Mistakes made at this stage often lead to problems such as pain and infection. Sometimes conservative approaches in health tourism can cause the patient to travel again in the future. For this reason, the approach should be a little more guarantee than general dentistry.
4) Product Quality:
This point is very important. I get this message a lot "How much are you charged for X units of Zirconia crowns". Is every zirconia crown the same? Does every clinic use the same brands? Where and how are these crowns produced? For example, when a simple filling is made, 30 or more materials and devices are used. Differences in the quality of each of these products affect the quality of the final restoration. Now consider how complex it will be to manufacture the veneers and crowns used in cosmetic dentistry.
The cuts made in order to create a price advantage in the production steps will affect the success in the long and medium term. Especially the cheap Chinese made Zirconia blocks are used most frequently in the market.
Incompatibility occurs in Zirconium crowns that are not produced with a completely digital workflow. Manual correction is then required and micro-cracks occur in the crowns. This causes crown breakage and chipping in the short term. We manufacture Zirconia Crowns with Full Digital Workflow in our own milling machines and we only use Ivoclar - Germany - Zirconium and E.max Blocks. Unfortunately, many clinics have completely left this issue to the preference of laboratories.
5) Continuity:
Our clinic has been serving international patients since 2007 and is a clinic established for this purpose. However, we regret to see that the number of clinics opened by non-dentists is rapidly increasing. These clinics make health tourism with a commercial approach and unfortunately close the clinics if they cannot achieve their goals. If the dentists of the clinic you are contacting are not named or the owners of the clinic are not dentists, consider this matter carefully.
Dentists in Turkey are educated in global standards. However, when it comes to producing and operating, we can say the result and satisfaction of a patient depend on each dentist’s artistic talent, experience, and work ethics.
Those factors affect the pricing. So when a patient is looking to get the “cheapest” dental treatment, he/she should also consider these factors and make their decision while being aware of the possible problems they can face in near future.
Cheap dentistry clinics in Turkey create bad examples of how dental treatment qualities are in Turkey and eventually damage the reputation of Turkish Dentistry.
I hope that the clinics that make the mistakes i mentioned can develop themselves in the right direction and Turkish dentistry will gain the reputation it deserves.
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