A drastic decision. A Charente-Maritime resident, Vincent Michot, had a tooth pulled while he was in persistent pain. The fault, he says, is the lack of dentists in the region.
Vincent Michot has been suffering from toothache for two weeks. But this Saint-Jean-d’Angély wine worker found it impossible to get an appointment for two months, as there were not many practitioners in the area.
So, you decide to contact the ER, but the ER refers you to health professionals who have already turned you down.
“I take pliers, I pull out the tooth”
“I have the pain that is there, the headache, the toothache. I can’t eat, I can’t talk because I have a tooth that bothers me on my lip, ”she lists before the BFMTV microphone.
Faced with this impasse, Vincent Michot sees only one solution: to improvise as a dental surgeon and remove the aching tooth by himself.
“Not one or two, I tell my partner: ‘I’ll take some tweezers, I’ll pull out the tooth,’” he says. “She told me ‘don’t do that’, I told her ‘yes, yes, that’s what I’m going to do.’ So I did it”.
3-4 month wait for an appointment
These difficulties, this wine worker is not the only one who has encountered them. Many people in the region are also facing a lack of professionals.
“We have lost all the dentists in the area. And (the ones that remain) are not accepting new clients,” a resident confessed to our microphone.
“It’s a few months of waiting. We are about 3-4 months away from having an appointment”, admits another, when a resident says that he is obliged to go to Cognac, in New Aquitaine, that is, 40 minutes by car, to consult a a dentist.
A medical desert
The council, aware of the problem, is trying to find solutions. In particular, he built a boarding school opposite the city hospital to house students free of charge. One way to try to attract future doctors to the service.
“The best way to discover a territory or a city is to do an internship there. It is clear that the current doctors who are retiring are former interns of the Saint-Jean-d’Angély hospital”, explains the mayor of the city Françoise Mesnard.
The surroundings of Saint-Jean-d’Angély are classified as a very fragile medical desert. There are only four dentists for 53,000 inhabitants in the intercommunity.
Source: BFM TV
