Last year, with great reluctance, I was forced to register with a new dentist after a filling fell out and it became difficult to chew.
My previous dentist had been pressuring me into having costly treatments that served no purpose other than lining his own pockets, so I vowed to stop having check-ups altogether. Consequently, it had been more than ten years since I last opened wide and heard the dreaded sound of the drill.
My new dentist, a lady practitioner who came glowingly recommended, just smiled when I told her it had been a decade since my teeth were last examined. Not a dentist by any chance, are you? She laughed.
Open wide: Frequent visits to the dentist could cost you more than unnecessary bills
Dentists, she told me, are notorious for avoiding check-ups. But then, they know a lot more about the business than we do.
Last week, the Government warned the public to ignore dentists who tell us to come for check-ups every six months. In fact, according to experts at the health watchdog, The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), most adults need to have a check-up only every two years.
The experts at Nice first issued this advice seven years ago. But since then the dental industry has done much to obliterate this fact. It undoubtedly threatens to dent their incomes.
Currently more than 70 per cent of NHS patients are called back to their dentists within nine months of their last treatment, figures from the Department of Health show. And Nice says, There is good evidence that some patients are being recalled more frequently than is necessary.
There is good evidence that some patients are being recalled more frequently than is necessary.
Still, it is worrying to think that you might be missing out on a vital tooth-check. So perhaps it is better to just troop along in answer to the dentists frequent summons? But there are strong reasons why the Nice guidelines may make better sense both for the sake of your health and for your finances.
The first reason is to prevent overtreatment. Concerns have been raised that some dentists are exploiting the system and inflating their pay by encouraging healthy patients with strong teeth to come for needless examinations. Figures show their average salaries have soared in recent years and one in ten now earns more than the Prime Minister, taking home at least £150,000 a year.
Indeed, information gathered by the Conservatives indicates how dentists play the system through excessive appointment-setting or needlessly splitting courses of treatment into separate sessions.
The analysis, based on figures for 2008-09, suggests that 6.8million appointments a year are conducted this way at a cost to NHS patients of £117million in unnecessary charges. This represents a fifth of the £572million charged each year for treating NHS patients, the Tory analysis said.
Worse still, dentists can be so unscrupulous as to give you serious treatment, such as fillings, crowns and bridges, that you dont actually need. No one knows the full extent of this practice, because it is criminal. But it is hardly unknown.
Earlier this year, for example, Constantine Saridakis, a Lincolnshire dentist, was struck off after conning patients into paying thousands of pounds for unnecessary drilling.
The South African-born dentist was found guilty of ten incidents of dishonesty by a professional conduct committee at the General Dental Council. Saridakis had apparently insisted patients with perfectly healthy teeth were suffering from decay that required essential and costly treatment despite second opinions to the contrary.
When one professional colleague challenged him, he simply said, Sometimes Im in a money-making mood. Only the bravery of whistle-blowing dental nurses at his practice finally brought him to book.
Countless other patients have been affected, including the former BBC presenter Anna Grayson, 57. Last year she visited her local dentist for a check-up and was told she needed a filling. Grayson had the tooth filled but when it became painful she returned only to be told she required extra treatment costing hundreds of pounds.
Costly: Former BBC presenter Anna Grayson had a filling in a perfectly healthy tooth
Her suspicion aroused, she refused and instead went to Trading Standards officials, who were able to view an earlier X-ray of her mouth.
It showed that the troublesome tooth had previously been totally healthy and the filling she paid for served no purpose. Her dentist, Karen Hanbury, of the Den Dental practice in Teignmouth, Devon, was given an official warning by the General Dental Council.
I have experienced something similar, having fallen into the clutches of a rogue dentist ten years ago. He serially drilled and filled five of my teeth, then told me that I must have thousands of pounds worth of root-canal surgery, crowns and bridgework.
When I refused, he stormed out of the surgery room and left me there in the chair. My new dentist says there is nothing in my mouth to warrant any such work.
But there are other ways that hapless patients can increase their risk of falling victim to greedy dentists. According to one expert organisation, unscrupulous practitioners are boosting their profits by using cheap, potentially dangerous, fake-gold crowns and bridges on the unsuspecting public.
Dental laboratories are reported to be making thousands of gold-coloured dental implants each year for NHS and private dentists, using imported alloys that look like gold, but are not.
These cost a fraction of the price of real gold. Although some patients may agree to the cheaper metal to save money, NHS dentists are not allowed to use the copper-aluminium-based alloys, as they may corrode under attack from saliva and bacteria. They can then release potentially toxic metal particles into the mouth.
But there is no way of knowing how widely the use of fake-gold fillings has spread, because the NHS does not collect information on it. Government experts say it is very hard to check what implants are being used.
It is then a matter of Russian roulette as to what you get in your mouth, which is totally unacceptable in this day and age.
Richard Daniels, the chief executive of the Dental Laboratories Association, believes that thousands of patients may be affected.
He has warned: Most people will need a crown or a bridge at some point, so it is not a matter of if youll be affected, but when. It is then a matter of Russian roulette as to what you get in your mouth, which is totally unacceptable in this day and age.
But even with the most morally scrupulous dentist, unnecessarily frequent check-ups may expose you to another danger. This is due to X-rays, which have long been a feature of routine dental checks.
The risk level is controversial, but British researchers warned last year that the more dental X-rays you have, the higher your risk grows of developing thyroid cancer. Their study of just over 300 thyroid cancer patients, in the medical journal Acta Oncologica, found that repeated X-rays significantly increased the risk of the disease, prompting the researchers to question the widely held belief that dental radiography is absolutely safe.
Certainly, the disease has become significantly more common in recent years. The researchers, led by Dr Anjum Memon, a consultant in public health medicine at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, report that the rates of thyroid cancer in the UK have doubled from 1.4 in every 100,000 people in 1975 to 2.9 per 100,000 in 2006.
A number of earlier studies have reported a link between dental X-rays and cancers of the thyroid, salivary glands and brain. It is known that dentists and their assistants are at higher risk of tumours. Dr Memon has called for a rethink on the use of X-rays as part of routine check-ups and for greater caution when using them on children.
Terrifying: One in five women, and one in ten men admit to being gripped by terror at the thought of the dentist¿s chair
A more positive reason for not traipsing to the surgery every six months is that we dont have to worry about our wisdom teeth. Fashions have changed, so dentists should no longer be urging you to have them whipped out in case they cause trouble some day in the future.
The official guidance from Nice now is that unless your wisdom teeth are causing pain or pushing other teeth out of the way, they should be left exactly where they are. Around one in 100 people suffer serious nerve damage from wisdom-teeth removal, according to American Journal of Public Health. They can be left with no feeling in their lips, tongue and cheek.
Someone should have told that to the Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie, though. He was so convinced that his wisdom teeth were somehow responsible for a string of injuries that he had them pulled out in 2009. The expert advice now is that such fears are merely the stuff of tooth-fairy tales.
All of this should come as reassuring news to the many thousands of people who suffer extreme anxiety before they even enter a surgery. The Adult Dental Health (ADH) survey earlier this year found that one in five women, and one in ten men admit to being gripped by terror at the thought of the dentists chair.
It may also bring comfort to the growing numbers who guiltily fear that they can no longer afford to answer the dentists six-monthly summons. One in five of us have put off check-ups because of fear that the bills will be too high, according to the ADH survey.
Of course, common sense must prevail here. If you have problems such as inflamed gums, toothache, broken fillings and crowns or mouth sores that refuse to go away, then a prompt dental visit is a must. For the rest of us, aim to sit in the chair only once every two years. Quite simply, there is no good reason to put yourself through it any more often than that.
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