Suffering from a toothache, a winery worker decides to remove it on his own after he fails to quickly get an appointment with a specialist.
- A resident of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, an area classified as a very fragile medical desert, suffered from toothache and pulled out his tooth on his own.
- The wine worker was unable to find an available dentist in his town, in which there are only four specialists for 53,000 inhabitants.
- The patient developed an infection after having his painful tooth removed.
In Charente-Maritime, Vincent Michot was forced to pull a tooth himself, because he was unable to find an available dentist in his area. The wine worker lives in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, an area where the absence of health professionals is felt and makes access to care complicated.
“I take pliers, I pull out the tooth”
Contacted by BFM TV, the patient indicates that he suffered from a toothache for a fortnight. The latter was characterized by intense, diffuse and throbbing dental pain that could extend to the jaw, ear and neck. So, he decided to consult a dentist. Problem: impossible to have a medical appointment for two months, because in the vicinity of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, which is classified as a very fragile medical desert, there are only four dentists for 53,000 inhabitants.
The man then turned to the emergency room, which recommended that he contact specialists who had already refused to take care of him. “I had the pain that was there, the headache, the toothache. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t speak because I had the tooth that bothered my lip,” he details. To relieve the pain, Vincent then decides to use the hard way. “Neither one nor two, I said to my companion: ‘I’m taking pliers, I’m pulling out the tooth’. She said to me ‘don’t do that’, I told her ‘yes, yes, it’s yet what I’m going to do’. And that’s what I did”, he says.
Medical desert: “we can die”
After this delicate operation, he “had an infection”says his wife, Jessica, to France Blue La Rochelle. “Dentist already, ophthalmologist, ENT. You need a minimum wait of 1 to 2 months. We tell ourselves that it’s really better not to be sick because otherwise, we can die”she exclaims.
Questioned by the newspaper, the general practitioner Vincent Jédat also deplores the lack of practitioners in the region. “I’m going to have 35 or 38 treatments, plus all the people I’m going to have to call to renew the prescriptions. (…) You shouldn’t go below a quarter of an hour with each patient, otherwise there’s a risk to make a mistake. This is one of the first risk factors”.
