Hello All,
My first post and it looks like many people have bad outcomes with dentistry on the NHS. My 11 year old daughter has profound autism along with a diagnosis of ARFID and won't eat anything that isn't puréed, so her diet is yogurts, custards and mashed up Big Soups and that's it! Obviously this means she has major sensory problems with what goes in her mouth, and brushing her teeth is something of a battle she just barely endures as we've always done it.
She now has a small hole on one of her front adult teeth and possibly one starting on the other front tooth. We went to the LD dentist team and have been informed she'll need to go to the hospital to have an extraction. The dentist is unable to look and check her teeth properly as she refuses to let them, so I'm concerned that if she was neurotypical she'd just have a filling and be done with it, but because there's no way to do anything in her mouth unless she's knocked out under general she'll have the teeth removed. The reason being the hospital does not do dental work full stop under general or otherwise, they only extract.
This to me seems absolutely ridiculous that an 11 year old child has to spend the rest of her life without front teeth because the hospital won't do a filling. It's of course not her fault she won't let anyone in her mouth and has to be put under, she already has mental health issues that we can't get help on because the waiting list for LD-CAMHS is impossibly long, what's waking up without a couple of teeth going to do to her?
Is there really no service out there for people with ASD to have simple dental work done under the NHS under general anaesthetic? If anyone has any advice that would be great.
