Fun With 3rd World Dentistry

As mentioned in my last post, I´ve been battling a nasty tooth infection this last week. Today was the day to go back to the dentist and get done whatever needed to be done. My appointment was at 10:00am and once again I made my way down through Chang Puak district to the little dentist shop. There are plenty of high class dentisty places here in Thailand, and many of them can do some amazing things. Unfortunately, high class is not my style or budget for that matter. High tech dental work can be done here at pennies on the dollar for what it would cost in most western countries. With that said, I´m starting with pennies. ¨High tech¨ was not one of my options. This however does not limit my choices. In fact, it gave me many more to choose from. Little hole in the wall dentist shops are in every neighborhood here and more than happy to serve as best they can.

The guy I found has a little shop just on the main road through Chang Puak. The office is small, not fancy, but clean. My intial impression was that it actually looked more like a barber shop than a dentist office. The waiting room seats about 4 and looking into the back of the shop I could see 2 dental chairs and a small assortment of tools and supplies. The staff was very pleasant. The doctor himself was a fairly young man. My guess would put him in his early 30´s. To my suprise he greeted me in English, and asked me to take off my shoes and sit down. His English was actually quite good especially as to conversation that pertained to his field of work. Not uncommon for most younger college educated Thai people. His assistants were the usual pair of younger girls who spoke no English, but were quite polite and very competent at their jobs.

Today, I sat down, the doctor looked the tooth over, and gave me my options again. His recommendation was to do a root canal and cap over multiple visits. Total cost would be about $120. The second option was to just pull it and hope for the best. He told me that (while not the best option) it would probably be OK. So, on we went. Healthy amounts of Novocaine were injected and he went to work. I was nervous to say the least, but through simple meditation practices learned over the last year or so, I was able to sail through. Within minutes, the tooth was out and I could feel a huge pressure released in my jaw. Nothing more dramatic than that.

Start to finish, the whole time involved was less than 30 minutes. Total out of pocket for the office visit, extraction, and meds: exactly $15.21 (478 THB). Heck, I even got some free Colgate mouthwash samples!

Most memorable moment of the experience was actually paying the bill. In local currency, it was 478 Thai Baht. I paid cash with a 500 Baht note. The assistant promptly took my money and then went running back to the doctor who was already working on another patient. He had to stop what he was doing, and open his wallet to get my 23 baht in change. At that moment I remembered where I was. Oh yeah, ¨This is Thailand¨.

With that I´m going to close this post and get some needed rest. Tomorrow is another day, and there´s plenty to be done.