Mr Mazin Karkotli, a 34-year-old IT architect from Ipswich, Suffolk, has been awarded £12,500 from a former dentist with the help of specialist dental negligence solicitors the Dental Law Partnership after poor dental work, including unnecessary root canal treatment, led to months of agony – which took years to correct.
Mr Karkotli was a patient at Mile End Dental Clinic, 13A Nayland Road, Colchester, where he was treated by Dr Sayed Hossain Faghany. He moved to the practice in 2019, as it was closer to his workplace. In May of that year, Mr Karkotli attended the practice complaining of broken teeth, and deep decay was noted in one of his upper teeth. A few weeks later, a filling was placed in that tooth with no local anaesthetic.
“Over the summer, I kept experiencing pain in my top teeth. In August, I attended the practice again and Dr Faghany provided root canal treatment in the adjacent tooth to where the decay had previously been noted,” Mr Karkotli recalled. “However, as the months went on I was still experiencing a lot of pain in my mouth and my teeth had become really sensitive. I was wary that some of the treatment I’d received had felt quite rough, and I hadn’t been given any painkillers or anaesthetic in the process.”
In early 2020, Mr Karkotli attended a different practice for a number of emergency appointments due to the pain he was experiencing and his dissatisfaction with Mile End Dental Surgery. “The new dentist advised me that the fillings I’d been given were insufficient, and I was going to need further root canal to restore my teeth. I felt cheated that I was essentially having to repeat treatments I’d had previously, incurring double the cost,” Mr Karkotli explained.
“Particularly as we went into Covid lockdown, it was hard to get an appointment and I struggled with the pain my teeth were causing,” Mr Karkotli recalled. “It was really disruptive – I couldn’t eat in those areas of my mouth for months, I was regularly having to take painkillers and it was disrupting my sleep. It was so frustrating knowing nothing could be done about a lot of this during the pandemic.”
Frustrated with the experiences he had gone through, Mr Karkotli contacted the Dental Law Partnership in 2022. Further analysis revealed several errors in diagnosis and treatment planning that meant, had the relevant tooth initially diagnosed with decay been treated correctly in the first instance, Mr Karkotli’s pain and suffering could have been avoided, and both teeth that were poorly treated and ultimately damaged could have maintained an excellent long-term prognosis.
“When I looked back at the timeline and the number of times teeth were needing to be treated with fillings and root canals, it started to add up that my treatment with Dr Faghany hadn’t been right,” Mr Karkotli explained. “It’s taken until the start of this year – over three years from when my issues with these teeth began – for the crowns to be finished and my teeth to be back in a good state.”
Rebecca McVety of the Dental Law Partnership commented: “The distress and pain our client has experienced was completely unnecessary. If the dentist involved had provided the correct treatment, his problems could have been avoided.”
The Dental Law Partnership took on Mr Karkotli’s case in 2022. The case was successfully settled in June 2023 when Mr Karkotli was paid £12,500 in an out of court settlement. The dentist involved did not admit liability.