A Turkish man had to endure over a month of excruciating pain after he had four of his front teeth extracted by a cleaner posing as a dentist at a clinic in Istanbul.

According to documents relating to a recently resolved case filed with the Istanbul Civil Court, 42-year-old Hakan Yıldırım, an Istanbul man suffering from a severe toothache, called a dental clinic in the Kağıthane district to make an emergency appointment. His call was answered by Cemal Şenaslan, who introduced himself as a dentist and told Hakan to come by the clinic in the evening to have his dental problem examined and hopefully resolved. When the patient turned up at the clinic later that day, he was greeted by Şenaslan, who bragged about being a lecturer at a dentistry university, to make Yıldırım feel more comfortable. Little did the poor man know he would soon endure the most painful experience of his life…

Photo: Caroline LM/Unsplash

After briefly examining the patient’s teeth, Cemal Şenaslan told him that four of his front teeth had to be extracted. Shocked, Yildirim said that, to his knowledge, abscessed teeth should not be taken out, to which the visibly irritated ‘dentist’ replied – “Are you teaching me my job?” Having just heard the man brag about being a lecturer at a dentistry university, Hakan Yıldırım didn’t say anything else.

Cemal Şenaslan anesthetized the 42-year-old man and then proceeded to extract four of his front teeth, insisting that it was necessary and reassuring him that they would be replaced by a much nicer prosthesis. Yildirim endured the painful procedure and even paid the 1,000 Turkish liras ($35) fee requested by the ‘dentist’. He then left for the pharmacy with a prescription signed by Şenaslan.

Hakan Yıldırım first started suspecting that he had made a terrible mistake trusting Şenaslan when the pharmacist tried charging him for the prescription. His mandatory medical insurance should have covered the costs, and the pharmacist agreed, only the prescription had not been stamped by the doctor, so it wasn’t valid.

The next day, despite the excruciating pain that had set in, the man returned to the dental clinic, where his world came crashing down. The doctor there, a man named İbrahim Levent Ç., had no idea who he was, and when Hakan told him that he had been operated on by Cemal Şenaslan, the man seemed both amused and confused.

“Cemal is my cleaner, he comes and cleans in the evenings,” the dentist told Yıldırım.

Court documents mention that Hakan Yıldırım eventually ended up in the emergency room because he could not withstand the pain anymore. His face had ballooned because of the swelling and he had bruise marks all the way up under his eyes. Apparently, the pain only became bearable after about a month.

 

“Cemal Şenaslan is completely at fault in this case,” Hakan Yıldırım’s lawyer, Oğuzhan Er, told the court. “Apart from the damage to his body, the client was also traumatized psychologically. For this reason, we want 100 thousand liras of non-pecuniary damage to be collected from Cemal Şenaslan ($3,500) along with interest.”

The court recently sentenced the fake dentist to 2 and a half years in prison for practicing dentistry without a diploma and forced him to pay Yıldırım compensation for the trauma he had suffered.

We’ve seen people impersonating doctors before, quite a few times, actually, we’ve seen others practice law successfully without any training, but this is the first time we have written about someone not only impersonating a dentist but also inflicting so much unnecessary pain.