By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
MOSONMAGYAROVAR, Hungary—The first day was, admittedly, not great. Within hours of landing in Vienna, a jet-lagged Nancy Carothers was tilting backward in a dental chair, mouth wide open, a dentist poking at her molars.
It wasn't too painful, though. It was also part of the plan. And by the end of her 10 days in this small border town, Carothers had much to smile about. She had visited Budapest and Vienna, sampled some of Hungary's most popular wines and enjoyed people-watching in neighborhood cafes. When she returned home to suburban Washington, D.C., she brought gifts for friends and a few souvenirs of her own, including eight new crowns.
A trip to the dentist may not be everybody's idea of a vacation, but it paid off for Carothers. Literally. The tab for her dental work came to $2,900 — about a quarter of the $11,150 she estimates she would have paid had she gone to a preferred dentist in her employer's insurance plan. In all, she spent just under $4,300 on dental care and travel, including a $45-a-night hotel room and last-minute airfare at a pricey $899.
On top of that,
"I could see a country I'd never seen before," says Carothers, a Silver Spring, Md.-based health educator with the federal government.
Thursday May 18, 2006
The Guardian
Dental treatment
Where: Hungary
Cost: X-rays are free. Root canal treatment (tooth with one root canal) is £60; tooth extraction £30
UK equivalent: X-rays £40; root canal treatment £60; Tooth extraction £90.
Advantages: Hungary is the dental capital of Europe. A recent report in the International Journal of Health Geographics used a traffic-light system to show areas with the fewest dentists. England and Wales were bathed in red with fewer than four NHS dentists per 100,000, lagging behind Poland and the United States. Compare those figures with Sopron, a small town tucked into the western Transdanubian region of Hungary, where there is a dentist for every 80 inhabitants. Hungary's dentists are far from back-street practices where you risk your molars being extracted with a pick-axe. Many are situated in the annexes of exclusive hotels and have several fully equipped treatment rooms, x-ray facilities and sophisticated implantology equipment.
