Amalgam Removal From Afar: How We Plan Your Treatment Before You Ever Reach Harley Street Last month we were messaging a patient in Qatar. It was gone eleven at night for her, and we'd been going back and forth on WhatsApp for a fortnight, X-rays, photographs of her bite, a voice note explaining a symptom she'd never mentioned to another dentist. By the time she landed at Heathrow six weeks later, I already knew more about her mouth than most dentists know about a patient they've seen twice. That's not unusual for us. It's become, quietly, one of the more important parts of how we work. Why people end up finding us from so far away Patients travel to Harley Street for amalgam removal from right across the UK, and increasingly from far beyond it, the Middle East, Australia, the United States, all over Europe. Almost none of them are choosing us because we're nearby. They're choosing us because they've searched, sometimes for years, for a dentist who takes mercury exposure seriously, who's trained to the SMART protocol properly rather than as an afterthought, and who won't make them feel foolish for asking questions their own dentist waved away. That search has a cost, though. Nobody wants to fly halfway round the world, or even just up from Cornwall, to sit in a consultation chair and be told "yes, we can help, come back another time." The distance makes every wasted visit feel enormous. So we've built a way of working that tries to close as much of that gap as possible before you ever get on a train or a plane. What the process actually looks like It usually starts with a message, WhatsApp for most people, sometimes a phone call if that feels easier. We ask you to send through any recent X-rays your current dentist holds, which most practices in the UK and abroad are obliged to release to you on request. We ask for clear photographs your fillings. If something needs explaining properly, we'll get on a call. From there, I can build a genuine picture. How many amalgam fillings you have. Their size, their age ans approximate a cost to remove.Whether your case is straightforward or whether it needs a longer visit, or more than one. I'll tell you honestly what I think before you've spent a penny on travel. I want to be equally honest about the limits of this. Photographs and X-rays are genuinely useful for planning, they are not the same as sitting in front of you with a mirror and a probe. Nothing about a remote consultation replaces the clinical examination that happens the moment you're actually in the chair, and there will always be small things we can only confirm once you're here. What remote planning does is make sure that first in-person appointment is spent treating you, not discovering basic facts about your mouth we could have established weeks earlier by message. Why this matters more for amalgam removal specifically A cracked veneer or a routine check-up doesn't really need this kind of preparation. Amalgam removal does, because the SMART protocol depends on knowing exactly what we're dealing with before you're in the chair. How many fillings, their size, their position, whether isolation with rubber dam will be straightforward or will need adapting, whether we're realistically looking at one long appointment or a case better split across two visits during your stay. Patients travelling a long way want, understandably, to get everything sorted in as few visits as possible. Planning properly in advance is usually what makes that possible. What I'd ask of you, if this is you Don't wait until you've already booked flights to get in touch. Message us first, send whatever X-rays and photographs you have, even if they feel incomplete or old. The earlier we can look, the more accurately we can tell you what your visit will involve, how many appointments you'll likely need, and roughly what to expect it will cost. That's not a sales conversation. It's the same honesty I'd want if I were the one getting on a plane. What I'd ask of my profession Distance shouldn't mean a lower standard of information before treatment. Too many patients travel for hours or days on the strength of a five-minute phone call and a guess. If we're asking someone to organise flights, time off work, sometimes childcare, around a dental appointment, the least we owe them is a proper, considered plan before they leave home. It's not complicated to offer. It just requires actually taking the time. That patient from Qatar, incidentally, needed one long appointment, not two. We knew that before she'd boarded her flight, because we'd done the work together, message by message, weeks before she ever sat in my chair.
Dr Daniel Sutcliffe
Dentist/Cosmetic Dentist at The Bespoke Dental
Dan qualified from the University of Manchester in 2004 and has practised biological and integrative dentistry for over twenty years. He joined the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology in 2015, achieved Accredited status in 2023, and is the only IAOMT SMART Protocol Mentor in the United Kingdom, which means he teaches the protocol to other dentists. He was made a Fellow of the Academy in September 2026 and is the only IAOMT SMART Protocol Mentor in the United Kingdom, and a Fellow of the Academy.. He has removed more than 10,000 amalgam fillings. Patients travel to Harley Place from across the UK and from abroad, and a good number come because they are anxious about dental treatment rather than because of the treatment itself.
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