Jon Denton went to Turkey with £3,500, fourteen implants, and a genuine hope that he was finally about to get his smile back. He came home with no teeth at all.
The 34-year-old delivery driver from Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire is now raising funds to fix what went wrong, and his story has become one of the more harrowing cautionary tales to emerge from the booming dental tourism industry that has seen thousands of Britons fly to Turkey in search of affordable treatment.
His troubles did not start in a dentist’s chair. They started on a road in January 2020, when Jon was involved in a serious motorbike crash that forced doctors to knock out his front teeth just to get a breathing tube down his throat. Metal was then inserted into his jaw during his recovery, and the combination of trauma and difficulty brushing left his remaining teeth in a steady state of deterioration. By the time he was ready to seek help, he was dealing with constant toothache and had to cut his food into small pieces just to get through a meal.
He reached out to a dentist in the UK and was quoted £30,000 for the treatment he needed. That was not a realistic number for a delivery driver with two children, so he started looking elsewhere.
He found a clinic in Turkey with good reviews, no high-pressure sales tactics, and pricing that sat comfortably in the middle range of what was on offer. It felt like a safe choice. In January this year, he flew out and had 14 implants screwed into his mouth over the course of six hours in the dentist’s chair, followed by his new teeth being glued in the very next day.
At first, he loved what he saw in the mirror. Then the pain came. Not the manageable kind that comes with any dental procedure but the nine-out-of-ten, throbbing, constant kind that had him wishing he had broken his leg again instead. His temporary bottom teeth fell out while he was sitting on his sofa laughing. The infection set in. Brushing became impossible. He flew back to Turkey in March 2026 for what he was told would be a straightforward fix.
He woke up from sedation with nothing in his mouth.
The dentist, he claims, had removed all of the implants while he was under, citing implant failure. Jon was then given two options: pay for dentures at the same clinic, or accept a partial refund of £2,700. He took the refund and flew home.
“I remember waking up and there was nothing there,” he said. “There was no need to remove them all. It was a shock.”
He locked himself away for days after returning. His partner’s birthday came around recently and he tried to eat a piece of soft cake. He could not manage it.
Jon is clear that he does not want his experience to be read as a blanket warning against dental work in Turkey. He acknowledges that plenty of people have come back with excellent results. But his outcome has been the opposite, and the toll it has taken goes beyond his mouth. He says he wakes up in a bad mood every day, struggles to motivate himself for work, and worries about what the ongoing situation is doing to his relationship.
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” he said. “I wish I could turn back time.”
He is currently fundraising to cover the cost of starting the entire process again elsewhere, this time hoping for a very different ending.
