DR MAX PEMBERTON: Is this the REAL reason you can’t get an appointment with your dentist? The truth will shock you…

You don’t need me to tell you that trying to obtain an NHS dentist appointment has become a frustratingly difficult affair. You ring, you stay on hold only to be told there are no NHS slots available for months. Do you wait or do you admit defeat and pay privately for something you really shouldn’t have to?

The NHS dental crisis is serious with millions of people simply unable to find a dentist. It’s a scandal that successive governments have failed to address.

The British Dental Association is absolutely right to call these statistics a ‘badge of dishonour.’

So how on earth has a system that once worked so well become so broken, you might wonder? Newly published figures have revealed one shocking factor.

NHS hospitals in England performed 56,143 tooth extractions on children and teenagers in the financial year ending 2025 – a 14 per cent increase on the previous year. The cost to the NHS? A staggering £87.7 million.

The primary reason (in 60 per cent of cases) for these extractions is entirely preventable tooth decay.

For the youngest children, the figures are even more alarming.

In those aged five to nine, tooth decay is now the single biggest reason for hospital admissions in England. That’s ahead of tonsillitis, ahead of broken bones, ahead of everything.

Seventy children a day are having teeth pulled out under general anaesthetic because they have been allowed to rot.

Yet tooth decay in young children is not some mysterious condition that descends without warning. It is, in virtually every case, the result of too much sugar and not enough brushing.

This, ultimately, comes down to what is happening at home. I have worked with children and families throughout my career, and I understand that parenting is hard. I am not here to lecture or to judge.

But when 43 per cent of children have not seen an NHS dentist in the past year, and tens of thousands are ending up in hospital with chronically rotten teeth, we have to ask ourselves what is going on.

The British Society of Paediatric Dentistry has called for every child to see a dentist before their first birthday, and for supervised tooth brushing programmes in early years settings.

I think they are both great ideas, however the foundations of good oral health are built at home.

Kids need their teeth brushed twice a day from the moment those first teeth appear. They need sugar consumption to be limited throughout the day.

Fruit juice, squash, fizzy drinks, biscuits handed out as rewards, sweet snacks before bed: all of these are adding to the problem.

I know it can be challenging and sometimes it’s easier to just give a child a bag of sweets in return for five minutes of peace, but building good habits is key to a child’s health and much easier to achieve if you start early.

The knock-on effects of this crisis extend well beyond the dentist’s waiting room, too. Tooth pain is causing children to miss school and parents are taking time off work to accompany them to hospital appointments.

NHS surgical lists are filling up with procedures that should never have been necessary, pushing back appointments for people with other dental needs.

There is also a more sinister consequence that is not being talked about enough. Oral cancers are frequently picked up during routine dental check-ups.

Dentists are often the first to spot suspicious lesions in the mouth, the kind that, caught early, are highly treatable.

But when people cannot get appointments or avoid private care, when surgeries are overwhelmed or when dentists are spending their time on emergency extractions that could have been avoided, those cancers go undetected.

The University of Central Lancashire’s dental school has reported seeing patients, who have not been to a dentist for years, arriving with oral cancers that have had time to progress.

What can be done? The Government must invest seriously in NHS dental provision and make good on its promise to transform the service by 2035.

But families can and must act.

• Gently brush children’s milk teeth with a soft brush as soon as they come through.
• Use fluoride toothpaste – a smear for the young, a pea-sized amount from age three.
• Cut down on sugar and register your child with a dentist before their first birthday.

These are small things. But they could spare your child enormous pain – and they might just free up an appointment for someone with a problem that cannot wait.

Frankie’s brave candour

Loose Women’s Frankie Bridge has spoken candidly about trying ketamine therapy and how it was a huge help when it came to managing her mental wellbeing.

Having reached a point where she felt life wasn’t worth living, she decided she had nothing to lose by trying something new.

Singer Frankie, who has been in the public eye since she was 12 years old, has always spoken with honesty and courage about her mental health battles which will have helped others enormously.

Regular readers will know I have written before about the very real dangers of ketamine when it is used recreationally. However, therapeutic ketamine, administered under proper clinical supervision, is an entirely different matter.

For a subset of patients with severe, treatment-resistant depression (people who have tried multiple medications and therapies) ketamine has shown promise. It works differently to conventional antidepressants, acting on glutamate receptors in the brain and producing effects much more rapidly. For some, it can be life changing.

The difficulty is that it remains largely unavailable on the NHS.

If it works, it should be available to everyone who needs it, not just the better off.

Frankie is right to hope it becomes more widely available. So do I.

 Dr Max prescribes… The Body Keeps The Score

I’ve been rereading this landmark book by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and am reminded what a great piece of work it is. 

It explores how trauma, rather than simply being a psychological experience, becomes embedded in the body itself, shaping the way we think, feel and move through the world. 

It’s a book that fundamentally changes the way you understand both yourself and other people.