More than half a million people in the United Kingdom now travel abroad each year for dental treatment. The number jumped from 431,000 to approximately 523,000 according to Office for National Statistics data — a 50% increase driven by soaring costs at home and the collapse of NHS dental access. Turkish clinics alone saw over 400,000 international patients in 2023. Most return home with a new smile and money saved. Pawel Bukowski came back without any teeth at all.
The 48-year-old forklift driver from Watton, Norfolk, had lived in the UK for two decades after leaving Poland. He was a father of three and a husband. By all accounts, he was steady and quiet, someone who took pride in how he presented himself. In January 2025, he traveled to Turkey to address his periodontal disease — a chronic infection that had been destroying his gums and loosening his teeth. By late April, he was dead.
The plan was supposed to be straightforward. He would have his remaining teeth extracted at a private Turkish clinic, be fitted with temporary dentures, and return months later for permanent implants. Instead, the clinic removed all of his teeth and told him he would receive no temporary replacements. He would need to wait six months and come back for the implants. He was sent home with nothing in his mouth and no interim solution.
For a man whose appearance was core to who he was, according to his wife, the result was catastrophic. He couldn’t eat normally. He couldn’t smile. He couldn’t present himself to the world the way he always had. And he had paid a lot of money for it.
Daria Bukowska told the Norfolk Coroner’s Court that the failed dental work destroyed her husband’s confidence and triggered a psychological collapse. He began drinking heavily. His mental state deteriorated rapidly. His family became frightened. He was telling people he wanted to die.
Emergency services were called on the evening of April 24, 2025. Bukowski was taken to Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. In the early hours of April 25, a senior practitioner assessed him. The clinical notes are stark: he was described as “hopeless with a strong suicidal ideation” and had “several risk indicators” for suicide.
Despite those exact words written by a professional, the hospital determined he did not need psychiatric admission. He was referred to a mental health liaison team and discharged.
A psychiatrist was scheduled to visit him at home on April 28. Staff sickness delayed the visit by three hours. When the psychiatrist finally arrived, Pawel Bukowski was found hanging. He was pronounced dead minutes later, just before 1 p.m.
Coroner Johanna Thompson recorded a conclusion of suicide. Bukowski had left messages and notes making his intent clear. But Thompson went further, noting “several lessons” that needed to be learned and stating it was “clear there were factors which impacted upon the care provided to Pawel.” She described the failure to admit him after he presented with active suicidal ideation as a “missed opportunity” for more intensive intervention.
His wife was blunt. She said his problems were “overlooked at every chance.” She pointed to the lack of medication for alcohol withdrawal symptoms, the gaps in follow-up, and a system that saw a man in crisis and let him leave.
“Pawel was failed at crucial points,” Bukowska said. “I hope that this is never repeated, that other families get to keep their dads, husbands, brothers and sons. Pawel deserved better.”
The Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust launched an investigation after his death.
The question that haunts this story is why Bukowski was in Turkey in the first place. The answer is simple: he couldn’t afford treatment in the UK. A full set of dental implants at a private UK clinic costs between £25,000 and £35,000. The average take-home salary in the UK is roughly £29,000 to £31,000 per year. That means a full-mouth restoration would cost about a year’s salary. For a forklift driver supporting three children, the math was impossible.
The NHS dental system has effectively collapsed for many. Waiting lists climbed from about 6.1 million after the pandemic to around 7.4 million by 2024. People in parts of northern England and Wales wait more than 24 months for routine care. In regions including the South West, North West, and Yorkshire, 98% of dental practices are refusing new NHS adult patients entirely. Some areas no longer have waiting lists at all because practices have closed their doors completely.
Turkish clinics offer all-inclusive packages — full smile makeovers for £3,000, flights and hotel included — versus £15,000 or more in the UK. When you understand those numbers, Bukowski’s decision to board that plane makes perfect sense.
What happened to him was extreme, but complications from overseas dental work are not rare. A survey published in the British Dental Journal found that 86% of UK dentists have treated patients who developed problems after procedures abroad. Even with a conservative complication rate of 3-5%, thousands of patients every year walk into UK dental offices with infections, nerve damage, and ill-fitting restorations.
One woman from Telford paid £3,000 for implants involving a sinus lift and bone graft at a clinic in Antalya. She said she could feel everything during the procedure and described a hammer being used during the sinus lift. Nearly 18 months later, she was still on daily prescription medication and had spent over £2,000 on corrective treatment back in the UK.
A frequent issue is aggressive tooth preparation. Clinics shave teeth down to tiny pegs or stumps, far beyond what is clinically necessary, to fit crowns. The damage is permanent. Worse, the NHS has said it generally cannot provide corrective treatment for complications from cosmetic work done privately overseas unless there is a specific clinical need. Patients who go abroad to save money can end up stuck — unable to afford fixes at home and with almost no legal recourse against a foreign clinic.
Americans face similar pressures. Dental care in the United States is brutally expensive, and insurance coverage is notoriously thin. A full set of implants can easily run $20,000 to $50,000 depending on the case and the market. Mexico and Costa Rica have become popular destinations for Americans seeking affordable care, heavily marketed on social media.
The appeal is undeniable. So are the risks. When treatment goes wrong thousands of miles from home, there is no easy fix, no regulatory body to complain to, no malpractice suit to file. You are on your own, dealing with the fallout in a country where the original provider has zero accountability.
The dental profession has started saying the quiet part out loud: dentistry is never purely mechanical. Removing a full set of teeth and sending someone home with nothing — no temporaries, no plan, no psychological preparation — is not just a clinical failure. It is a failure to treat the person sitting in the chair as a whole human being.
Tooth loss wrecks people in ways that don’t get discussed enough. It is not vanity. It affects how you eat, how you speak, how you show up in public. Research has shown that people who experience tooth loss have higher rates of depression and social isolation. When it happens suddenly, as it did to Bukowski, the psychological impact can be devastating.
Pawel Bukowski had grown up in Poland without a father. His dad died in an accident when Pawel was 12. He put himself through university, worked in Italy, and built a life in England. His story doesn’t reduce to a simple cautionary tale. It is about a dental clinic that removed every tooth from a man’s mouth and gave him nothing in return. It is about a crisis in dental access that forces working-class people to gamble on overseas treatment. It is about a mental health system that identified a man at extreme risk and still didn’t intervene in time.
His wife said she hopes it is never repeated. But the conditions that created this tragedy — unaffordable care at home, unregulated care abroad, and mental health services stretched past the breaking point — haven’t changed.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988.
