Britain's dental tourists are being sold up the Danube

The best part of 48 hours have passed, yet still I find myself smiling at a story I read in one of the Sunday broadsheets. My smile, incidentally, could be a bit whiter, my bottom teeth a mite straighter, although at least I didn't spend my adolescence wearing a brace. In a boys' grammar school in northern England in the 1970s it would have been tantamount to wearing a badge saying "please bully me".

The story, you'll have gathered, was about dentistry. Apparently, increasing numbers of Britons are travelling to Hungary for private dental care, sold down the river by rising costs here, and forced up the Danube by cheap treatment there. One surgery in Budapest is even advertising "teeth holidays", a package - I prefer "plaqueage" - including return flights, discounted hotel rooms and cut-price cavity work.

It is an irresistible concept; a bunch of Brits with varying degrees of tooth decay, being offered pink mouthwash on the plane, and emerging into the arrivals hall at Ferihegy Airport to look for their rep, the guy with the white coat and the reassuring manner.

One man with gum disease who took advantage of the offer had been quoted £15,000 for bridgework by his dentist in England. He said of his trip to Budapest: "One good thing about it is that you are with other toothless people over there. We all went round the city with no teeth and had a good time." It must have been handy that the culinary pleasures of Hungary, such as sour cherry soup and stuffed cabbage, are perfectly compatible with missing molars. If the English are considered by the Americans to have poor teeth, imagine what the Hungarians must think.

Why Budapest, though, as opposed to Prague, say, or Kiev, the story didn't entirely make clear. But dental care there is certainly cheap. Crowns cost up to £950 in Britain, but only £180 in Hungary, and how much more exotic to have a Hungarian crown, or a Franz Josef as they are doubtless known in the trade.

If you discern some scepticism here, you can put it down to the conversation I had with a dentist friend of mine on Sunday evening. My friend has a practice on Merseyside, and thought the story exemplified not Europe's east/west divide but Britain's north/south divide. His prices, he said, were a sight closer to those charged in Hungary than those presented as the norm in Britain. "I don't think you'll find too many people in Liverpool taking easyJet flights to Budapest," he said. "It would be cheaper still for people in southern England to take the train to Lime Street." In other words, forget the goulash, try Knotty Ash.

My friend was amused to read of the dentist charging £15,000. For that kind of bridgework, he implied, you'd want Isambard Kingdom Brunel in charge. "I can't imagine anyone up here ever charging that kind of money," he said. In the north of England and Scotland, he assured me, fixed-fee dental care is still widely available on the National Health. The story in the Sunday paper had been written, he continued, entirely from a south-of-England perspective. Needless to say I mounted a vigorous defence of my profession, arguing that a southern bias is hardly ever evident in the London-based press, with as few as 19 out of 20 restaurant reviews, for example, focusing on the capital.

But he was adamant. He also mounted a vigorous defence of his own profession, deploying the figures used in the story. "Dentistry in Britain is big business," it asserted. "There are 32,000 dentists registered and they share an annual NHS pot of £1.2bn." My friend pointed out that this amounted to roughly £37,000 each. "I don't think," he said, "that £37,000 is a particularly good income for a highly-trained professional person. That's one of the reasons why dentists leave the NHS." Now, it is not this column's intention to help Britain's dentists bite back.

I myself was horrified to be charged nearly £200 a few months ago for 40 minutes of straightforward dental work. But clearly there is no need to jump on the first flight to Budapest, any more than Victoria Beckham needed to spend a reported £35,000 recently on having her dazzling smile reconstructed; a job which, according to my friend, would have cost £372, tops, on the NHS.

He also drew my attention to an issue which is causing much more anxiety in the world of dentistry than the eastwards leakage of clientele. There is an increasing incidence of allergic reactions, among both dentists and patients, to latex gloves. Indeed, this latex allergy was the subject of a seminar he attended recently, at which someone pointed out that it is now possible to obtain condoms made not of latex but from cows' or pigs' intestines. "Is that the small or the large intestine?" my friend asked. I wonder whether Hungarian dentists have such a ready wit?

b.viner@independent.co.uk