Bogota Blogger

In Bogota you can find  great doctors and dentists, many of whom have trained in the United States, and there’s a level of care that is probably superior to what we have in the US because there’s not the pressure put on by insurance companies and the malpractice issues that dominate medical care in the US.

Colombia can be a great place to have any kind of medical or dental procedures done that would be very much more expensive in the US.   So, I went to see the Smile Designer.  The Smile Designer is Christian Salazar, a cosmetic dentist who makes people look good.  I wanted my teeth whitened, and a couple friends had been to this dentist before for similar procedures.  Ever since I didn’t wear my retainer after I got my braces off when I was a teenager, I have had a space between my two front teeth, just like Madonna and Lauren Hutton.  I’ve never minded it, and I don’t think it has hindered me in any way.  But Christian said he could fix it for me (without braces), but that sometimes people don’t want that because it’s become a part of who they are.  While I never minded the space, I certainly wasn’t attached to it either, so I decided to go ahead and have it dealt with.

The technique for dealing with it turned out to be building up both front teeth a little with resin–almost like sculpting new teeth.  First I went through the whitening sessions–three of them–with ultraviolet light treatments that lasted about 40 minutes each.  These actually hurt just a tiny, tiny bit, and left my teeth sensitive for the rest of the day, but by the next morning, everything was fine.   How you react to this is totally individual;  some people experience much more sensitivity and pain, some less.

After that whitening was done, Christian built up the front teeth with resin and polished everything up.  I was amazed at the difference.  My teeth are now white but not artificially so, and my tongue has gotten used to the LACK of the space in the front of my mouth.  I love how it looks, and I smile a lot more just to show my teeth off.

The Smile Designer, by the way, does a lot of the cosmetic dentistry for the TV show called Cambio Extremo, the Colombian version of Extreme Makeover.  He trained at NYU and works on many of the Colombian film and TV stars. 

And, though his prices are high by Colombian standards, he’s certainly cheaper than any dentist you could find in the US.  His office is also very Zen and minimalist, white walls and sofas, light wood floors, an occasional aquarium on the wall, a couple of little garden-type spaces here and there.  Check him out  if you think you might want a smile designed  too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Bogota is Cheap, Medical and Dental Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.