Vincent Michot suffered from a persistent toothache, without being able to find a dentist near his home, in an area classified as a medical desert. He finally resolved to pull his tooth alone.
A drastic decision. A resident of Charente-Maritime, Vincent Michot, pulled out a tooth himself, while suffering from persistent pain. The fault, he says, is a lack of dentists in the region.
Vincent Michot has been suffering from a toothache for two weeks. But it was impossible for this wine worker from Saint-Jean-d’Angély to get an appointment for two months, as there were not many practitioners in the area.
He therefore decides to contact the emergency room, but the latter directs him to health professionals who have already refused him.
“I take pliers, I pull out the tooth”
“I have the pain that is there, the headache, the toothache. I can’t eat, I can’t speak because I have the tooth that bothers my lip”, he lists at the microphone of BFMTV.
Faced with this impasse, Vincent Michot sees only one solution: to improvise as a surgeon-dentist and pull out the painful tooth alone.
“Neither one nor two, I say to my companion: ‘I take pliers, I pull out the tooth'”, he says. “She told me ‘don’t do that’, I tell her ‘yes, yes, that’s what I’m going to do’. And that’s what I did”.
3-4 month wait to get an appointment
These difficulties, this wine worker is not the only one to have encountered them. Many people in the region also face a lack of practitioners.
“We have lost all the dentists in the area. And (those who remain) do not take on new clients”, confides a resident to our microphone.
“There are a few months of waiting. We are about 3-4 months to have an appointment”, recognizes another, when a resident says he is obliged to go to Cognac, in New Aquitaine, i.e. 40 minutes by car, to consult a dentist.
A medical desert
The town hall, aware of the problem, is trying to find solutions. In particular, it built a boarding school in front of the city hospital in order to house trainees free of charge. A way of trying to attract future doctors to the department.
“The best way to discover a territory or a city is to do an internship there. It is clear that the current doctors who are retiring are former interns from the hospital of Saint-Jean-d’Angély “, explains the mayor of the city Françoise Mesnard.
The surroundings of Saint-Jean-d’Angély are classified as a very fragile medical desert. There are only four dentists for 53,000 inhabitants in the intercommunality.
