'It was done so badly it was unbelievable': Turkey's dental tourists speak out on booming industry

Rida Azeem knew her dental trip to Turkey had gone wrong the minute she took her mask off.

"I had big gaps underneath my gums, and you could see all the metal bits (of the implants). It was done so badly it was unbelievable," Azeem, an engineer from Manchester in the UK, says.

"Originally, they were going to do five implants," she says. But when the treatment was about to start, the dentists told her they would "have to remove all your teeth".

"They looked professional," says the 42-year-old, who now has to wear veneers.

Attracted by the promise of the perfect smile at an unbeatable price, 150,000 to 250,000 foreign patients flock to Turkey every year, according to the Turkish Dental Association (TDB), making it one of the world's most popular dental tourism destinations alongside Hungary, Thailand and Dubai in the UAE.

Tarik Ismen from the TDB insists that Turkish dentists are only responding to demand. 

"Some people want to look like Hollywood stars and have a bright, fluorescent smile," he says.

He explains that botched surgery rates of "3-5% is acceptable... and could happen anywhere", adding that not one of his association's 40,000 dentists had been struck off.

"Turkish dentists are the best and the cheapest in the world," declares Türker Sandallı, who pioneered dental tourism in Turkey 20 years ago.

He boasts that "not one tooth has been extracted in 12 years" in his Istanbul clinic, where 99% of the clientele are foreigners.

"But, and I am sad to tell you this, 90% of Turkish clinics go for cheap dentistry," Sandallı says, accusing illegal operators of damaging the industry's image.

The head of an Istanbul clinic, who did not want to be named, said that some clinics in Turkey treat teeth that do not need treatment.

"They put