Summer is the busiest season for dental tourism.

Statistics on this trend are hard to come by, but it is estimated that each year over one million people from around the world travel outside their country for some form of dental treatment.

While filling a cavity might be a simple dental procedure to have abroad, dental implants and more complicated dental treatments may not be as straightforward.

Dental implants can be a particularly risky dental treatment to receive abroad due to the recuperation period needed and follow-up appointments.

Just ask Palm Coast, Florida, resident Helen Hyjek, who recently traveled to Costa Rica for dental implant treatment.

According to WFTV News in Florida, Hyjeck received both upper and lower implants while on a planned dental vacation to Costa Rica. But once she returned home she found that her implants were too big, which caused her gums to continually bleed. She is in constant pain and has returned three times to Costa Rica in an attempt to get her implant issues fixed — all to no avail.

Meanwhile Hyject has spent in excess of $15,000 dollars in her efforts to save costs on what is typically considered an expensive dental procedure by dental patients here in the U.S. She doesn’t have the money to fix what has gone wrong and says the implants sound like “nails to a chalkboard.”

The ADA advises that dental patients who are considering dental treatments outside of the U.S. look at optimal oral health and costs versus the perceived value of dental tourism.  The ADA further warns of the potential difficulty in seeking redress if problems are encountered with dental treatments performed in a foreign country, which is exactly what Helen Hyjeck is now experiencing.

Dentists, have you had to repair dental implant treatments that were performed by a dental professional outside of the U.S.?

For more on this story see: Woman Shares Medical Tourism Dental Nightmare