Going to the dentist isn’t exactly something most of us look forward to. It can feel stressful and pretty vulnerable—there’s nothing cute about someone poking around your mouth with loud instruments. And on top of that, the bill can be painful too.

So it’s not surprising that many people put off appointments for years. Sometimes it’s a lack of oral health knowledge, sometimes it’s financial strain, and sometimes it’s mental health struggles that make everyday hygiene difficult. Whatever the reason, avoiding the dentist can leave teeth in rough shape.

And when these patients finally show up, dentists are the ones who have to deal with the aftermath. Which means they’ve seen it all. Across various Reddit threads, they’ve opened up about the most alarming and unsettling cases. Read them below.

#1

I went in for a cavity to be filled. The dentist asked if a med student could observe. I was fine with it, have to learn some time.

While the dentist is getting everything ready and double checking the tools, the med student explains he doesn’t brush his teeth. It’s a waste of time “if you have a healthy body”.

It’s not the dentist’s fault I thought he was crazy. But, I never went back again.

#2

My dentist told me that he had a preteen patient who needed everything removed and replaced with dentures. Her teeth were so rotted that she had mold. Brush your teeth, kids.

#3

I once fell asleep at the dentist and woke up to “open, open! Open!!!” because I had closed my mouth on the nurses finger.

#4

People who won’t swallow their saliva even at the end of the appointment, they’ll just sit there holding their mouth going “mmm mmm” expecting you to just know to suction. A horror story is definitely one time I had to hold someone’s teeth while cleaning because they were so mobile. Thought those bad boys were going to pop out any second.

#5

I have one particularly vile patient. She was lying back in the chair , she felt something in the back of her mouth so just spat it out , forcefully, straight up and onto my face . I get rage every time she shows up .

#6

My partner used to be a dental therapist and worked in schools. He remembered this one little girl who opened her mouth and each tooth was surrounded and full of knotty, pieces of her black hair. Just everywhere masses of it with gunk too. He can’t forget the horror from seeing and cleaning it all out. I’d just imagine it to be like cleaning the shower drain lol!

#7

Not a dentist, but my case has been a nightmare for my dentist.

I have a tooth impacted way up in my nose, rather close to my eye. It’s taken a team of four separate dental professionals and 8 years to even begin to sort it all out.

#8

Not a dentist, but my mum works at the office.

Apparently, he was working on a patient who rarely came to the office; as in, they’d probably see her once every few years.

I’m not even going to go into the details, but a live bug flew out of a socket in her gum, where a tooth had rotted out. A living bug. Why.

#9

My aunty is a dentist and she told us this story about how this little kid had to have all of his baby teeth removed because they were black and rotting. His mum said he wouldn’t drink anything except Coke. He was 3.

#10

Nothing really gets to me anymore in private practice, but after dental school I did a dental residency at a level one trauma hospital in New York City where most of my best stories come from. Rivers of pus from draining abscesses were pretty routine at the hospital, as were unbelievable levels of gum disease. Certain kinds of gum disease you can smell a mile away. The saddest stories were the little toddlers who needed extractions due to their parent’s absolute cluelessness – some of the parents didn’t even seem neglectful, just had no idea how cavities developed or that baby teeth actually required care (“Aren’t new teeth just going to grow in anyways?”)

Grossest personal story: Sometimes a tooth with a big cavity in it will grow granulation tissue (which is pink like gum tissue), more common in kids but occasionally you’ll see it in adults. One time we had an adult patient who had a tooth with granulation tissue that looked exactly like a worm crawling out of his tooth. I have an insane phobia of worms so that was horrifying for me. I think this was the only time I’ve ever had to excuse myself from the room.

#11

Every dentist I’ve ever gone to for routine cleaning has been either surprised or downright horrified when they look in my mouth and see lots of scarring. This has happened consistently. I won the genetic jackpot when it comes to my teeth and jaw, and I had the whole orthodontic experience. Braces for eight years, pallet spreader – I can still find those scars with my tongue – spurs, chains, and those demonic little rubber bands. Then to top it all off, jaw surgery to correct the second worst case of underbite thus far in my state. You could almost fit two fingers in the gap when my jaw was closed. I actually met and befriended the first worst case in high school, but we didn’t find out until that weird conversation came up where everyone brags about how many times they’ve been in the hospital, and we figured out that we had had the same procedure. We had both thought that we were the only person among our friends who had titanium attached to their skull.

Anyway, it always makes me laugh when I see dentist’s eyes widen. After informing them of my dental history and the fact that my parents refer to my grin as the “million dollar smile”, we have a good laugh and I pay them more money to maintain that smile. I really, really like being able to actually bite into my food.

#12

I graduated from a dental school in a third world country and it was one of those hospitals that was supported by the government so that meant almost free treatment without insurance. So we were flocked by all sorts of people with questionable oral hygiene.
So this guy walks up complaining of a swelling at his jaw. Didn’t complain of pain all that much but with an obvious swelling at the angle of the jaw externally. We could make out he was a homeless person who used to be on the streets near the hospital looking for syringes. So he is made to open his mouth (coz he can’t do it by himself) and we see floating in his mouth and infesting his gums, white squiggly things. They turned out to be live maggots which have eaten away into his putrefying and necrosing wound on he inside of his cheek and gums.

#13

I was in dental school. I was doing a new patient exam and this middle aged lady is sitting in my chair. She tells me that she wants dentures and so like any good dental student I start trying to dissuade her from dentures because dentures suck and I was pretty sure we could save some teeth, just by seeing her smile, they didn’t look that bad.

Anyways we take x-rays and get her back in the chair and I’m starting to get a little worried about saying that she wasn’t going to need dentures because looking at the x-rays she has some pretty good bone loss. The bone around the teeth hold the teeth where they are supposed to be and she definitely had some bone loss. ( TLDR for all my periodontal classes in dental school: You get bone loss when your teeth are dirty)

So I start talking to her a little more about why she thinks her teeth are so bad and she says they move around and wiggle sometimes. Ahh, I think, I’ve seen mobile teeth many times, no big deal.

Then she did something that I have never forgotten. She reached up to her front right tooth and reaches behind it with a single finger. Then she pushes on the back of the tooth and points the entire tooth straight at me. I had no idea that a tooth could move like that.

This being dental school, I still have to do a thorough exam and charting on every single tooth. Part of this is sticking a ‘probe’ next to each tooth and pushing it between the gum and the tooth gently until it stops. Healthy gums around healthy teeth will go 1-3 mm. 4-6 mm is typical for someone with moderate gum disease. Our probe went to 15 mm and I maxed it out consistently when I was measuring her teeth. Not only that, but every time I brought the probe out it was so covered with pus that I had to wipe it off or I couldn’t count the markings.

Well, we pulled all her teeth and she got dentures.

#14

So, I’m actually a dentist. Shock, horror, I know!! There are 2 cases that jump to mind.

The first case is heavily based around poor hygiene. When I was a student in dental school we worked on an emergency clinic once a month on a rotation basis. This acted as primary care for people either without a regular dentist, homeless people or people who were just visiting the city. A man, middle aged with no relevant medical history, came in with the complaint of sore gums. When he opened his mouth his gums were blood red (not a good sign) and were actually weeping blood as I sat there. Whilst performing a periodontal examination (checking for gum disease using a blunt ended probe) I must have burst a pocket of infection underneath the gum as this wash of pus ran down his teeth, onto his tongue and he threw up there and then. Fun times.

My second case is a bit more standard. It is the usual case of patient comes in with a huge facial swelling and you have to do something about it. The usual case is extracting the offending tooth however it isn’t always obvious (if the swelling extends across multiple teeth) or the patient cannot physically get numb (due to anaesthetic not working as well in a heavily infected environment). At this point either antibiotics or an incise and drain is indicated. As you can probably guess while reading this we opted for incise and drain, the swelling was deemed so large that antibiotics wouldn’t tackle it and it could cause danger to his airways. With the help of a senior dentist in the practice we attained surface anaesthesia with something called Ethyl chloride (think liquid nitrogen, could spray that freezes) and incised this swelling and sucked the pus out. No sutures and no anaesthesia for 2 main reasons. 1) We don’t want the anaesthetic spreading the infection through surrounding soft tissues and 2) the capsule surrounding the infection is very friable so likely just to break down.

#15

Worked as a dentist assistant while studying…we had a lady come in who’s teeth were black with erosion due to the fact she was bulimic. All the acid from the vomit had eroded the enamel.

#16

My dad is a dentist. These are the two stories that stick out for me.

He went to dental school in a major metropolitan city in the south. Being in a big city, there were tons of homeless people around that the students practiced on. He got a woman one day who came in with what appeared to be an abscess. He begins working on her only to have a cockroach come running out of it, down her cheek and onto the floor. She said she slept outside a lot and that it probably crawled in her mouth while she was sleeping.

The other story happened fairly recently but isn’t directly related to oral hygiene. A woman came into his office with some sort of beehive hairdo. As he was working on her mouth, he kept seeing movement in her hair out of the corner of his eye. Once again, roaches. Luckily they didnt spread about the room or office, but he had to fire her as a paitient after that.

#17

Dental nurse here. We once pulled a bit of old rotting chicken out from under somebodies implant denture. It smelt like Satans fart.

#18

My girlfriend is a dentist. She worked at a kid’s dentistry for a few months.

One day a mom came in with her son, the mom was clearly not the…cleanest person.

They bring the son back who has been complaining about his gums hurting extremelly bad. Thought it was an infection or really bad sore, and wanted to get it checked.

Inside his mouth was an apparently *disgusting* cyst. One of those nasty pulsing ones that you see in an alien movie when the protagonist gets onto the mother ship and finds the incubation room.

Anyway, so after some discussion they decide to do the procedure in a semi normal way: numb the kid up, *ahem* de-inflate the cyst, then remove it. Easy as can be. Sorta.

So they numb the kid, prepare for an incision, and cut away. Out *crawls* a larvae…thing from this cyst it had been living in.

Honestly, I told her to stop telling me about her day at work right then. I don’t know what happened after that as I was trying desperately not to puke while driving as she told me this. She had a bit more… detail.

But yeah, this horror story haunts me and is great for parties.

#19

There was some slimy pink tentacle in there. Poor kid might have a parasite; it seems to have attached itself to his lower jaw.

#20

Once when I was a kid the dentist was briefly confused by a metal filling he didn’t know was there. In actual fact it was a remnant of the foil wrapper from the illicit kit kat I had sneaked from the kitchen earlier.

#21

My mum said her boss found a tomato plant growing under a patients dentures that they never removed for 3 months….

#22

Well let’s see. I had a guy come in with 7 wisdom teeth one time. For this counting, that’s 3 more than usual. I have had people with genetic diseases I and my instructors have never heard of (Trichorhinophalangeal syndrome). I have tons of people that want to blame everyone but themselves and their poor diet and oral hygiene for the state of their teeth.

#23

I’m a doctor and I went to see a patient in hospital as I had looked at his bloods and they were a bit off. It was night time. The curtains were round his bed.

I walked into the room. I pulled the curtains back. The guy was sitting on his bed, which was covered in blood; there was this thick mixture of saliva and blood slowly drooling from his mouth down his gown. On his bed, I could see these little yellow things.

Teeth. They were his teeth. He was sitting there, in the dark, at 3am, pulling out his own teeth. I’ve no idea how he was doing it, as there was no instruments to hand that could be used, the guy wouldn’t tell me.

So. Yep. Don’t send your kids to medical school.

#24

I’m a sanitation technician in a dentists office, but I often stop by some of the rooms to learn about the procedures or to help the dentists and assistants. One day these two half Asian siblings come in, about 40 years old, the brother was a jerk and very negligent of his sister who is mentally disabled, she can never brush her teeth on her own and this guy can’t even bother to help. All of her teeth were rotting inside of her mouth for what seems to have been a very long time, we had to extract everything from her mouth, by the end of the procedure there were at least 8 teeth on the surgical tray that were completely black and smelled really bad. I had to throw the teeth into the biohazard bin and every time I open it I just get a whiff of her teeth.

#25

In college I saw (live, not in class) a case of Acute Necrotizing Ulcerative Gingivitis (ANUG, Google it, I dare you), which is the necrosis of the mouth tissue leading to a rotten smell and a white necrotic tissue over the patient’s gums (the tissue is the necrotic gums). The smell is so horrible that everyone could sense it from afar and even using two masks it was nauseating to say the least, I will never forget that smell.

Sorry for any gramatical mistake, English is not my primary language.

#26

I’m not a dentist but I knew that it freaked the guy out and it wasn’t necessarily gross but anyway, I grind my teeth at night which has resulted in teeth falling out (baby teeth so I’m safe). Anyway, dude was pretty new and they had put me to sleep and he said when he pulled one tooth out that it basically turned to dust the second it was set onto the tray. He thought he did something wrong because he’s never seen that happen before. I’ve gone through about 5 retainers, putting a hole in them because my grinding is so bad. But yeah, that’s what happened!

#27

One of my patients had a history of being denied appointments because she was way too agressive with us, causing her to get kicked out a bunch of times which ended up in her scraming about how she needs urgent care and all of that nonsense.

A couple months pass without hearing a word from that specific patient , which is good. Until one day she just walks in but this time she was mellow and really polite.

Since she was acting like this, there was nk way we could deny her a checkup/ procedure so we just took her in. While doing the routine thing where you make her bite that hard thingy majingy then you look at her X-Rays , we noticed that she had multiple holes in many of her teeth. Huge issue.

This condition is called Holeinaitus and what it basically is , is the rottening of the tooth/ teeth to the point that holes start forming inside the teeth. We all knew we had a huge problem in our hand so we just pulled out that tray full of needles and other things and we just went to work.

Her mouth looked like it hadnt been brushed since 2004 and it smelled really bad so obviously operating wasnt really that easy. Its okay because I had a pair of nose plugs from when I would operate on middle eastern people so all was fine until we used that mirror looking thing on her mouth to see the teeth more clearly but then a bunch of puss just popped out. That caused me to resign..

#28

My Dad’s a dentist. He pulled out a patient’s dentures and they were covered in mold. Yep, the patient was wearing moldy dentures.

#29

An old depressed man once had so much calculi (is that the English term? The impacted hard white stuff) that it covered his teeth entirely. Removing that caused two teeth to fall spontaneously because there was no more tissue to hold them..

#30

I’m a dentist in NZ.

Was working in hospital and a Maori woman came into the clinic. She was complaining of pain in her front tooth. She had had multi extractions in the past and also had a lot of carious lesions in her mouth. The front tooth in question looked nothing like a tooth, asking her about it, she said that she’d had the tooth extracted some time ago, but didn’t like the gap. One day she had been walking along the beach and found a seagull. She basically took it home, cut the beak off and shaped it and then superglued it into her mouth. It flapped around of course, but she seemed happy with it. Although the gum around it had turned malignant, probably due to the superglue and also the continous irritation of this beak.

TL DR – Woman supersglues a birds beak onto her gum to look “better”

PS : One other case I had in London, had a guy come in and wanted me to cut all his lower teeth into spikes so he could appear to be like Darth Maul – I declined to treat him.

#31

Dentist here. I’m sure I have seen and pulled thousands upon thousands of rotten teeth and have worked on some outrageously infected mouths. Things that would make a non-dentite gag, but that type of stuff doesn’t get to me a bit anymore. I feel bad when patients are embarrassed about their mouths, because it literally doesn’t phase me at ALL. Ive seen worse, probably in the same day.
The #1 thing that bothers me the most are people who just REEK of cigarette smoke. I’m not talking about the person who just had a cig on the way to the office, I mean the people who have that god awful smoke smell emanating out of every pore and every article of clothes. We keep a tub of Vicks vaporub to rub on the inside of our masks for these types of people.

#32

Dentist – 34 years in practice. I always warn patients – No smoking after extractions (any surgery actually), explaining the increased risk of “dry socket” (osteomyelitis).

One day a smoker returned with a dry socket, swearing that he had NOT smoked as per directions. His significant other backed him up. After numbing him and during the debridement of the socket, I removed a chunk of vegetable matter which he identified as chewing tobacco. Now, my post-op instructions include restricting chew.

#33

Sort of related. My late husband went to the dentist to have a crown put on. As he’s lying back, the dentist fumbles the crown, it lands way back in his mouth..hubby’s reflexes take over and he swallows the crown. He came home and asked me for a strainer. Yep, he pooped through a strainer until the crown showed up. He took it back to the dentist who ran it through their autoclave several times. They then installed the crown, and it was fine. He seemed puzzled about why I insisted on throwing away the strainer.

#34

Not a dentist – but my brother’s dentist said this was the weirdest thing ever. My brother had been having serious jaw pain for weeks and he said his back teeth hurt like he’ll. He thought he was getting in his wisdom teeth, because he had never noticed this particular tooth before, and the gums around it were really inflamed. Made sense to him – the tooth was just breaking thru the skin. Then it got infected. His gums swelled up and he said his mouth always tasted like chicken soup. So he goes to the dentist (like a month or more after the pain started) and the dentist is shocked. Because it’s not a wisdom tooth. It’s a chunk of chicken bone. My brother has no idea how this could’ve happened.

Tl;Dr my brother thinks he’s getting his wisdom teeth, turns out its not a tooth, but a rogue chicken bone.

#35

General/Cosmetic dentist here. I once had a patient come in complaining about a lost veneer. It turns out what she had done is buy a box of plastic stick-on French manicure nails and superglue the tips to her teeth. She had been re-sticking them for years, but she finally got tired of it and wanted me to use some of my “dental glue” to get them to stay on more permanently. When I refused and instead tried to get her to let me clean off the layers and layers of crusty glue and food and plaque, she was PISSED and stormed out screaming about how I was only in this for the money and how dare I not help out a poor mother. The thing is, from a distance, they didn’t actually look all that bad. Up close, a rotting disaster, but from afar I was actually pretty impressed with her ingenuity.

#36

General Dentist: I wish not to insult such a large group of people, but there is not other way around this. Mexican border towns: have some pretty awful dentists.

To make this hit with full effect I want you to understand what a bridge is. Bridges are used to replace a missing tooth. It is a fixed device, usually gold or porcelain. The bridge will completely cover two neighboring teeth, and look like three or four teeth fused together. This fills the space and when done right can look fantastic.

Had a lady come in, with a moderate amount of pain. She said she had some work done a few years ago, and now some of it was bothering her. Took an x-ray. What I found was a bridge in bad shape. Here’s the run down. It was her lower right jaw. She was missing two teeth, and a 5 unit bridge had been made. It was a nice bright white porcelain, with some metal underneath to support it. (this is normal). What wasn’t normal was it looked like the bridge had not fit. Looks like it was too high over the second tooth that supported with bridge. No problem, looks like the dentist drilled a hole into the bridge and placed what must have been a screw into the tooth (very not normal). The third tooth must have been a real issue as the bridge portion looked as though it missed it completely, way too long. No problem, seems like the home depot must have had a sale, because a 3 inch long screw was placed through that into the bone.

So where does that leave the lady? Well the bone soundly rejected the screw on the third support. Obviously. So there was a large infection surrounding the screw and the bridge was movable (really bad thing). The second support had abscessed due to the screw in it . And the first tooth was in bad shape because the entire bridge had turned into a lever, making it very loose. Essentially we had to remove the whole thing, provide a surgical bone graft and cross our fingers there was not permanent damage.

Don’t get dentistry done in a border town.

#37

When I was a student, my instructors told me some stories

A lady came in saying her gums were sensitive, they looked in her mouth and her gums were literally peeling away, they had her rinse and actual pale pink pieces of gum were coming out of her mouth. It was the consistently of bubblegum when it gets chewed for too long and it’s extra sticky. So they ask what she’s been doing and it turns out she’s been brushing with Comet (powdery toilet cleaning bleach) because it was cheaper than whitening.