i don’t know how she got together with him, they turn my stomach. However there should be more help for adults with terrible teeth, the cost is too prohibitive for him to get them fixed
I agree. So many people on this thread just saying stuff like "in this day and age", "just get them fixed", "get them bleached" etcetc. It's not that easy. Sometimes people have simply neglected them. Sometimes people have been in the grip of a phobia. I keep posting on various threads under various usernames (still so ashamed of my ex-phobia that I can't have it linked to other posts). I had a horrendous phobia and didn't go for 30 years. I was lucky - only needed 3 fillings and had cosmetic treatment (composite bonds - I mentioned them early on this thread). But it was so so difficult to actually go to the dentist at all. It took me nearly 18 months to even make an appointment once I'd made my mind up that I had to deal with it. And lots of crying and panicking and all the rest. But I found a lovely dentist and I think it's ok (think the phobia isn't going to rear its ugly head again) and she said I'd really looked after my teeth very well.
I would like to bet that a significant proportion of people with terrible teeth as described in the OP and by others on this thread are dental phobics and can't see a way out. And as the teeth get worse the phobia gets worse because they know they are going to need so much doing.
I live in another country now but I would like to see some kind of organization set up for dental phobics as a one-stop shop for them where they can get the information they need, contact NHS and private dentists who can deal with his, get access to therapy if necessary and so on. And it should be via the NHS (yes, I know they are completely overstretched) but these dental phobias are a serious mental health issue which need to be taken seriously, understood and treated because the resulting physical health issues arising from the inability to face getting dental treatment are also very serious.
And a second problem is lack of access to NHS dentists and not being able to afford treatment. I live in another country in Europe. We are able to go to a private dentist, pay the bill, send the bill to the health insurance organization (it's a different set up to the UK obviously, it's not private health insurance, it's like national insurance contributions) and receive the amount of money back that would have been paid out for treatment at one of the public dentists.
You can even have treatment abroad.
So I was able to go to this amazing dentist in Hungary, who was fantastic about my phobia and was able to have a scale and polish and the three fillings (took 4 months to have all of that done - building up in tiny steps), I paid for them and was then reimbursed. It's not a huge amount of money but as Hungary is at least half the price anyway and I was reimbursed the amount payable for a filling in my more expensive country, it ended up costing me very little indeed.
Something like that might be a possibility to ease this NHS dentist crisis in the UK..
I've wittered on, sorry... but I do think that if just one dental phobic reads one of my posts (and a few people have chatted to me privately after reading one), and it helps them in some way then I can be forgiven for boring the rest of the people!