About This Site

What this is — and what it isn’t

This site is an independent guide to dental treatment at Istanbul Galata University (IGAU) Faculty of Dentistry, Oral and Dental Health Hospital in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, written for international and expat patients who are trying to work out whether treatment here makes sense for them.

It is not a clinic marketing page, and it isn’t trying to read like one. Most of what’s published about dental treatment in Turkey is written to close a sale — a single “before/after” price, a satisfaction percentage with no source, a “world-class” adjective doing the work an actual fact should be doing. That approach is common, and it makes it genuinely hard for a patient abroad to figure out what something will really cost, who will actually treat them, and what a realistic timeline looks like.

This site takes the opposite approach on purpose: procedure-by-procedure guides that explain what a treatment actually involves, what it costs here compared with the UK and Germany based on published 2026 market data, and what questions are worth asking before you commit — including the honest cases where traveling abroad for treatment isn’t the better option. Where the fair comparison points against a trip, the guide says so.

Who writes it

This site is maintained by Senem Demir, a final-year dental student (intern) at the IGAU Faculty of Dentistry, Oral and Dental Health Hospital in Beyoğlu.

That distinction matters, so it’s worth stating plainly: all treatment described on this site is carried out by the hospital’s licensed academic staff — supervising faculty dentists and specialists — not by the author personally. As an intern, my role at the hospital is to study, observe, and assist under the supervision of licensed clinicians as part of my dental training; I am not the treating practitioner for any procedure described here, and nothing on this site should be read as an offer of treatment by the author. Where this site describes a procedure, a price range, or what to expect as a patient, it is describing the hospital’s clinical service delivered by its qualified staff — informed by my day-to-day exposure to how the faculty hospital actually works, from the patient’s side of the process as well as the clinical one.

I started this site because I kept fielding the same questions from international patients and their families — about cost, about what a “teaching hospital” actually means for the quality and supervision of their care, about how long treatment really takes — and found that no single, honest, procedure-specific resource answered them properly in English. This is my attempt at that resource, written and maintained alongside my studies.

What “teaching hospital” means here, honestly

IGAU’s Oral and Dental Health Hospital is a university faculty hospital — dentistry is taught and practiced on the same site, which is a different model from a private dental clinic and is worth understanding clearly rather than glossing over:

Every patient is treated under the supervision of licensed academic staff — professors, associate professors, and specialist clinicians who hold the relevant qualifications and are legally responsible for the treatment provided.
Students at various stages, including interns in their final year, may be present, observing or assisting as part of their clinical training, always under direct faculty supervision. The extent of student involvement varies by department and case, and a patient can always ask exactly who will be performing their treatment.
This model is common internationally for university-affiliated dental hospitals, and it often means access to a wide range of specialties (periodontology, endodontics, prosthodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry) under one roof, frequently with academic-level case review that a smaller private clinic may not offer.
It is a different environment from a boutique private clinic — appointment scheduling, case volume, and the general feel of a large teaching hospital differ from a small international-patient-focused practice, and that trade-off is worth weighing honestly rather than assuming one model is simply “better.”

If any part of this is unclear for a specific procedure, the honest answer is to ask the hospital’s international patient office directly before booking — and this site will keep saying that rather than smoothing over the question.

How the procedure guides are put together

Each guide on this site (general dentistry, oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, endodontics, prosthodontics and implants, and others as they’re added) follows the same standard:

What the treatment actually involves, described at the level of accuracy a patient needs to make a decision — not simplified into a slogan.
A price comparison against the UK and Germany, built from published 2026 market data and clinic price lists, clearly framed as an orientation range rather than a quote — because real prices depend on your own case, imaging, and materials.
An honest read on when traveling for treatment is, and isn’t, the better choice — including the categories (like a single straightforward root canal, or routine pediatric care where free public coverage is available) where it usually isn’t worth it.
What to actually check before committing — accreditation, named materials and brands, written treatment plans, realistic timelines, and what aftercare looks like once you’re back home.

No guide on this site names or promotes a specific clinic, and none is written to make Istanbul, or IGAU specifically, sound better than the facts support. If something is a genuine trade-off — a longer teaching-hospital appointment process, a treatment that needs multiple trips, a procedure your home dentist could handle just as affordably — it’s stated as a trade-off.

Getting in touch

For appointments, referrals, or questions about visiting as an international patient, the hospital’s international patient office can be reached by phone, fax, or WhatsApp — contact details are listed on the Contact page of this site.

This site itself is an independent, patient-facing guide rather than the hospital’s official communications channel — for anything requiring an institutional response (billing, formal complaints, medical records requests), please contact the hospital directly rather than through this site.

If you notice something on this site that’s out of date, unclear, or doesn’t match your own experience as a patient, I’d genuinely like to hear about it — the whole point of this site is to be more accurate than the alternative, not to be comfortable.