Problems after veneers done elsewhere?

A story we hear too often

Patients come to us with a new set of veneers from another clinic and, more often than we would like, the same story. Before payment, everyone was warm and attentive, like old friends. After payment they felt invisible. At the first adjustment visit the bite felt high and it was eased. At the second, they waited the best part of an hour, were told to "keep biting, it will settle", and nothing was done. There was no third visit.

What the examination usually finds

• Veneers that are poorly made and poorly finished — the fit at the edges is not what a laboratory piece should be.
• Tartar that was never removed: the veneers were fitted onto teeth that had not been cleaned first.
• Excess bonding cement still stuck around the margins, never polished away — the ledges the tongue keeps finding.
• A tooth that hurts often turns out to need root canal treatment — a problem that should have been found on an X-ray before anything cosmetic was started.

Why we could not simply "fix it" — the guarantee trap

Here is the awkward part, and we would rather explain it than hide it. Most clinics guarantee their own work, and such guarantees usually end once another dentist touches it. If we polish those margins or open the painful tooth on the first visit, the original clinic can say the work was fine until we interfered, and the patient loses both the guarantee and the argument.

So this is what we tell anyone in this position:

1. Go back to the clinic that fitted the veneers first, and put the problems in writing — the high bite, the pain, the rough edges, with dates. Ask them to correct the work under their guarantee.
2. If they will not, or if you have decided you do not want them near your teeth again, come and see us. We examine, we photograph, we X-ray where needed, and we write down what we find.
3. Before we do anything to the veneers, we tell you plainly which of our treatments would end the other clinic's guarantee, so the decision is yours and not a surprise.

The standard of care before any cosmetic work

Every problem in that story comes from one root cause: cosmetic work was started on a mouth that had not been made healthy first. The order is not optional. Before a single veneer is planned, the whole mouth is examined and cleared:

1. A full examination and X-rays, to find what the eye cannot see — decay under old fillings, infection at the root tips, bone loss around the gums.
2. Scaling and gum treatment, so the veneers are bonded to clean teeth and healthy gums that will not bleed into the cement.
3. Root canal treatment on the teeth that genuinely need it — and only those — with each tooth then restored properly.
4. Only when the whole mouth is stable does the cosmetic stage begin: a mock-up you can see, a try-in before bonding, the bite checked, the margins polished, and adjustment visits treated as part of the job rather than a favour.

Skip the first three steps and the fourth is far more likely to fail — sometimes in weeks, sometimes in a year.

Two sales tactics worth recognising

The crown that gets smashed on the counter

Patients also tell us they were shown a single crown being struck to compare it with a dental bridge, and told that the bridge was the "inferior material". That is not how it works. A bridge is usually made from the same ceramic as a single crown. Its weak point is the connector between the units: the design has a joint, and a joint is where fracture starts. That is an engineering fact about the shape, not a grade of material — and it is the reason a dentist recommends a single crown, a bridge or an implant according to the tooth, the bite and the gap, not according to a demonstration on the counter. When the demonstration exists to move you to the more expensive plan, it is a sales tool.

Root canals on every tooth "to be safe"

There is another approach, the one the British press has nicknamed "Turkey teeth": treat the root of every tooth first, then crown or veneer the lot. It is fast, and it removes the risk of pain later, which is why it sells. It is not the standard of care. A tooth that is root-treated without disease is a tooth that has been killed while healthy. It loses its blood supply, it can darken over the years, it becomes more brittle and more likely to fracture, and a root-filled tooth carries a lifelong risk of infection returning that a healthy tooth never had. Root canal treatment is for teeth that need it. It is not a preparation step for veneers.

What we can do for you

If you are living with veneers that hurt, catch, or make you hide your smile, this is what a visit to us looks like:

• A first examination and written treatment plan at no charge — the conditions are on our free first examination page. X-rays are not included; if one is needed, we tell you the price first.
• A written record of what we find. You keep a copy, including the X-rays, and you can take it back to the original clinic if you wish.
• A plan in the right order: mouth first, cosmetics second. If the existing veneers can stay, we say so. If some must be replaced, we say which ones and why.
• Treatment by a dentist with more than 20 years in dentistry, 17 of them full-time in cosmetic dentistry in Phuket.
• Adjustment visits after treatment we carry out are part of that treatment, and follow-up checks are free.

If any of this sounds familiar, let us take care of it — to the standard of care, by a dentist with more than twenty years' experience. Book online and we will start with the examination.