- 30-year-old Miss Emma Denby from Camberwell, London, lost one tooth and has been left with another severely damaged tooth after her dentists failed to identify and treat decay
- She suffered anxiety and stress due to the excruciating pain that she experienced
- £9,000 received in compensation
Miss Denby joined Peckham Dental Centre, 71 Peckham High Street, SE15 in January 2013 and went to see Dr Matin Ahmadi and Dr Bob Caballero Cervantes for regular check-ups.
“When I first saw Dr Ahmadi, he took an x-ray and said everything looked fine,” Miss Denby recalled. “He and Dr Cervantes never gave me any reason to be concerned so I just trusted that they knew what they were doing.”
In October 2015, Miss Denby saw Dr Caballero Cervantes as she had started to experience terrible pain in one of her back teeth.
“I remember I was eating and felt this awful pain in my tooth,” Miss Denby said. “It was really painful. Dr Caballero Cervantes said I would need a filling so I went back a couple of weeks later for this.”
Yet three weeks after she’d had the filling, Miss Denby’s pain had become so excruciating, she went back to see Dr Caballero Cervantes again.
“He gave me antibiotics, but that just made it worse as I had an allergic reaction to them,” Miss Denby explained. “I was starting to feel really stressed and anxious as nothing was helping the pain and it was only getting worse. I’d lost confidence in Dr Caballero Cervantes and Dr Ahmadi as it just felt like they didn’t know what they were doing.”
Miss Denby decided to join a new dental practice. Her new dentist took an x-ray and advised that she would need one tooth extracting and the other required further work due to extensive decay.
“I was so angry at Dr Ahmadi and Dr Caballero Cervantes,” Miss Denby said. “I was always told that everything was fine so to hear that I would have to have my tooth removed was really upsetting. It’s even worse to think if I hadn’t changed dentists my teeth would be in an even worse state.”
Tyla Westhead of The Dental Law Partnership commented, “The distress and pain our client experienced was completely unnecessary. If the dentist had carried out adequate treatment in the first place, all her problems could have been avoided. We hope the compensation she receives goes some way towards paying for any additional treatment required.”