Best Priced Dentistry Dr. Alberto Coto Calvo Terribly botched dental work San Jose, Costa Rica

I initially was recommneded to Dr. Alberto Coto Calvo at the recommendation of a friend who had been to see him.  She had a crown done and said it was great. Feeling confident now having a lead, I decided to try out his services.  Man, what a huge mistake.

I wish I had done further research, because now I see that I am just one of many who have suffered physically and financially at the hands of Dr. Calvo.  I went to have a cleaning, a couple cavities filled, and three root canals and crowns put on.  

The fillings and cleaning went swimmingly.  It was with the more costly root canals and crowns where things went awry.  Initially, it seemed fine.  I left Costa Rica after a week, had a great time, and was happy to have save 2/3 of the cost the work would have been in the US.

However, after approximately one month, I lost a crown.  Then, a month or two later, the other one went.  I contacted Dr. Calvo, and he apologized and offered to redo the work.  There was mention of him paying for my trip back, but I declined, thinking it was just a fluke thing.  Plus, I never mind coming to CR.

Upon returning, though, things seemed a bit off.  Let me just say here that dentists in Costa Rica go to school for about five years.  The specialist, 7 years.  In the US it's more like 10 years, without the specialty.  This didn't concern me at the time.  Again, I was willing to trust. 

One of the crowns Dr. Calvo had made had gone missing.  He blamed this on a sour employee who had supposedly taken it out of spite...nice story, but probably not true.  Anyway, he replaced the crowns, and I was a happy customer...until I returned to the US.

Within a couple of months two of my new crowns had fallen out, again.  Then one that never fell out developed a cavity around the gumline due to the gap between the gums and crown.  I see I'm not the only one to have experienced this.  I couldn't afford to have the crowns replaced, so I went without for a year or so.  

Upon seeing a new dentist in the US, he gave me the grave news that I was looking at $6-10,000 in order to replace the lost crowns, fix a gap that had been left, and open a new gap where one should have been to begin with (imagine a little piece of filling leftover filling material that connects two teeth).  One tooth apparently had some weird coating put on it that is now coming off.  Another crown has a hole in the top.

Unfortunately, the worst of this is the fact that I might now lose a tooth that the so-called specialist operated on.  In two separate teeth, he didn't remove all the nerves and also left too much filling material down in the gum.  So much for his speciality and extra two years of training.

Please, whatever you do, take out a loan, borrow the money from a family member, do whatever you have to do in order to have your teeth properly fixed the right way the first time.  It will save you thousands of dollars and much suffering in the end.