I hesitate to even give these people one star. This was, far and away, the worst dental experience I have ever had in my life. The dentists at this practice butchered my teeth and I am still trying to undo the damage.
First of all, I got their name from a friend who raved about what great dentists they were. I suppose if all you need is a routine cleaning and maybe some whitening or a filling done, they would be fine, but I had some serious issues, and they were completely out of their league.
I had two teeth that need root canals when I went to see them. They took x-rays and sent me to a very good endodontist. Everything was fine until a tooth on the other side of my mouth broke a few days after the root canals. It was a small piece of the tooth that I lost, and they removed the shard and drilled out the tooth so that I could have an onlay put in. The entire time that the dentist was drilling, she was telling me how small the break was and how I was sooo sensitive and dramatic for making a big deal about it. She put a temporary filling in and sent me home.
Two days later, the temporary filling came out and I had an exposed root that hurt as much as any dental pain I've ever had. I was surprised by how much of the tooth was drilled out, but I went in to have the temporary replaced. This is when I had the worst medical experience in my life. Dr. Gold saw me. He couldn't get my tooth numb, even after 10 INJECTIONS! He put so much anesthesia in my mouth that my eye was numb, but I still had feeling in my tooth. I told him that I was not numb, and he basically said that I was crazy and started drilling anyway. I thought that I would black out from the pain. I was crying and shaking as he drilled and drilled and eventually hit the live nerve. I jumped and his drill slipped, cutting my mouth. I was completely traumatized, and the whole thing was like the dental scene in Marathon Man. He put a new temporary filling in and sent me home, still crying, with a hugely swollen face.
The next day, the temporary fell out again. I went back to the dentist, and they had an assistant see me. She tried to do a new temporary with no anesthesia and again the pain was so intense that I was crying. I went home and iced my face, hoping that this was the last of it.
The temporary came out AGAIN that night, and I just bought a tooth repair kit at the pharmacy and used the temporary filling compound to plug up the hole until my next appointment a week later. At this point, my tooth had had an exposed root for two weeks.
When I went in for the appointment to put on the onlays, there was some confusion and I was told that they had cancelled my appointment after they had tried to call me and tell me that my onlays were there from the lab. They had never made any calls; I had no voicemails or missed calls from them at all. I got very upset in the waiting room, and with much eye rolling and complaining, they agreed to see me then.
When the dentist put on the onlays, I told her that I had been having severe pain in my tooth and that I thought that something was wrong. She was extremely dismissive, saying that I was just super sensitive and that "it was all hormones (!)." She went on to tease me that it was the smallest onlay that she had ever done and that I was making a big deal over nothing.
The tooth never healed.
A month later, while on vacation in California, I bit down on a tortilla chip and experienced an electric shock of pain in the tooth. I went to a good dentist, and they explained that I had a crack horizontally through the entire tooth as a result of a massive infection that I had had for at least a month. I had to have an emergency root canal, but the abscess was so severe that I now have have surgery to open the gum and clean out the infection and remove any part of the infected root that they can find. They are not sure that they can save the tooth, and they might have to extract it. I have spent my vacation in excruciating pain, with a swollen face, neck, and forehead.
I went to aesthetic dentistry with a chipped tooth, and because of their arrogance, negligence, and incompetence, I have spent thousands of dollars and many days trying to fix the results of their shoddy work. I may lose my tooth altogether-a tooth that could have easily been saved by a halfway competent dentist. I have also not been able to do my normal activities because I have been in terrible pain for months. Not only did they do bad work, but they mocked me when I was in pain, cancelled appointments, and were generally unreliable and unskilled.
I would not send my worst enemy to these people. read more
