I had a filling fall out, and went with my girlfriend to a dentist so that she could translate (good thing, too, because he spoke almost no English). They wanted to put a $500 crown on to fix a filling that fell out. He wouldn't simply fill it, because he said my teeth would 'still be sensitive and a filling will not fix the symptom.'
I've always had sensitive teeth, and was not even considering trying to fix them. The only symptom I had was a hole where I had a filling out. And he also wanted to put fillings in four other teeth which I know from dental history are just discoloured, not cavities. So, I said no to all of that, and decided just to get my teeth cleaned because how can you possibly mess that up other than being a little rough, right?
Wrong.
Using the ultrasonic scaler, a hygienist haphazardly scraped the easy-to-reach parts of my teeth for ten minutes, said it was finished, and told me to go. No scraping the tartar or calculus off around the gum line. No polish. No fluoride rinse.
And that cleaning cost 70,000 won.
When I went back to Canada for holidays, I got my teeth cleaned and my one tooth properly filled for $450 and that was a bargain compared to the extortionist prices the incompetent dentists here charge.
Also, my dentist and I had a good laugh at the state of dental care in Korea.
It's the dentist on the University of Victoria campus, and we have a lot of international Korean students there, and he says that when they come in, their dental hygiene is absolutely atrocious and that even though they all say they've seen dentists regularly in Korea, the idea of a dentist actually doing a proper cleaning is totally foreign to them.
tl;dr version:
Korean dentists are by and large awful and should be avoided.
