the Price of Emergency Dental Care

The cost is for the placement of a temporary crown on a molar to tide me over until I could get the crown repaired/replaced at my usual dentist. The procedure was preformed in the middle of the night at an outpatient emergency clinic and as such they offer a variety of emergency services including dental work, setting of bones, and such, as well as transportation to a hospital, if necessary.

They take insurance, but not all kinds. Fortunately their prices for most emergency care is entirely reasonable. The cost quoted above reflects price for the service without insurance.

Middle of the night while out with some friends, I bit into a piece of especially sticky and gooey candy. When I opened my mouth, one of my teeth seemed to be stuck in the candy. Fortunately it wasn't a whole tooth, just a crown on a tooth I'd had a root canal in a few years ago.

Holding my crown in my hand, looking at it, I called my dentist. Being 2am I got the "please contact us during working hours" I expected, but also a "for emergency services call..." message. So I called, and they recommended a general emergency clinic around the corner (I'd had no idea it was there) and said they'd make an appointment with my dentist once they opened in the morning.

I went, it wasn't busy, but I wasn't in pain so I wasn't in a hurry. I told the desk nurse what'd happened, he winced sympathetically and handed me the usual patient sign-in papers when I told him it didn't really hurt.

Once I'd turned in the papers, I was seen more or less immediately. Quiet night. The doctor (an MD, not a dentist) was familiar with the process and put in a semi-hard rubbery coating over the gap where the crown was, and gave me a box to put the crown in for safe keeping, in case it could be reinserted easily. Turns out my dentist had no trouble doing so. She even managing to secure it well enough that I could eat gooey candy with it, though I don't really tempt fate on that one.

Emergency services are for emergencies, but people don't really check them out before they need them. And that's perfectly okay. Best thing you can do is know where the emergency services are and how to contact them. 911 usually works in the US, but sometimes emergency services have direct contact numbers for specific departments, and emergency clinics (ones not attached to hospitals) don't always work with the 911 system, though they're often more numerous than hospitals, and are more than able to handle all but the really complicated life-threatening stuff (heart attack, stroke, major car accident trauma, and the like are best left to hospitals). It's good to know where they are in your neighborhood, if you have them.