If you wake up with a terrible toothache in Costa Rica, do you go to straight to your doctor or do you check with your dentist first?

According to a recent study published in the British Journal of General Practice, going to a family doctor for a toothache is very likely to result in being sent home with a prescription for aspirin and antibiotics. Although this may be an adequate treatment in some instances, the longitudinal study raises concerns about the unnecessary prescription of antibiotics.

More than half of general practitioners in the 10-year study prescribed antibiotics to patients whose toothaches eventually drove them to visit their dentists.

Severe toothaches can become an emergency that may require extraction or root canal procedures. If your doctor tells you to take an analgesic along with antibiotics when oral pain is unbearable, he or she may be contribute to antibacterial resistance, which is a dangerous condition.

When you think back to all your visits to the dentist in Costa Rica or anywhere else, how often can you remember being prescribed antibiotics? At the Flikier Institute of Oral Rehabilitation, a specialty clinic that caters to dental tourists as well as to the local community, antibiotics are not prescribed indiscriminately.

The prescription of antibiotics by dental health professionals is measured and judicious. In fact, the Flikier Institute does not generally recommend taking antibiotics arbitrarily before dental tourists arrive in Costa Rica for dental procedures.

One of the British researchers in the aforementioned study concluded:

“The messages from our study are simple: general practitioners should avoid routinely prescribing antibiotics when patients present with dental problems, and more work is needed to identify how patients experiencing dental problems can be best directed to emergency dental services.”

For more information about the Flikier Institute and dental tourism in Costa Rica, please call 1-866-638-1102 (toll-free from North America).