‘I sawed out my rotting teeth with a shoelace-I thought it would be like shelling peas but I was very wrong’

A man who ‘sawed out’ his rotten teeth with a shoelace has warned other people tempted to try DIY dentistry: it’s not as easy as it looks online.

Grant Lakey, 61, felt he had no choice but to remove four of his bottom teeth after struggling to get an appointment at his local NHS surgery, and because he was unable to afford private treatment.

After growing fed up of feeling his lower teeth ‘moving around like marbles’ he decided to take drastic action after seeing a tutorial for DIY dentistry online.

He told Mail Online: ‘It looked as easy as shelling peas in the video, but in reality there’s a lot more blood and very sharp pain.

‘It definitely wasn’t as simple as it looked.’

Using a thin shoelace, he carefully hooked it around one of his sore, decaying teeth—and after a swig of beer for Dutch courage—he yanked it out using a side-to-side garotting manoeuvre, throwing the extracted gnasher in the bin.

Mr Lakey, who works as a mechanical manager, continued: ‘I could feel my teeth moving against my tongue.

‘I couldn’t get an appointment with the dentist to get them removed. I just thought, “I’ve got to pull them out”.

‘I got a thin shoelace, put it round the first one, garotted it, and it came out really easily.’

But although the removal went reasonably smoothly, Mr Lakey the open wound where his tooth had been became infected, and despite a course of antibiotics from his GP, it had a knock on effect on his other teeth.

‘I got a little bit of an infection, and then the other teeth became loose and started moving and rotating,’ he said.

It was time for more DIY dentistry, and over the course of the next few weeks, Mr Lakey again used this shoelace method to remove three more teeth from his lower right jaw.

Sadly for the Essex father-of-four, at the time of his shoelace extractions he had been dealing with excruciatingly painful dental problems for decades.

The starting point of Mr Lakey’s teeth issues can actually be traced back twenty years, when he smashed one of his front teeth—his left lateral incisor—on a piece of scaffolding while working on a building site in 1995.

Over the next three months the tooth became increasingly loose, ‘it was really aggravating me and I kept wiggling it with my tongue, he remembers.

Eventually he pulled the tooth out, but while waiting for an NHS dentist appointment to come available so he could discuss getting a plate which would disguise the gap, new problems arose.

In 1997, the other front left tooth and his left canine tooth began to loosen, and eventually both fell out after a series of gum infections and abscesses.

Now missing three teeth from the upper left front of his mouth, he became incredibly self conscious of his gappy smile, and he struggled to eat and drink without considerable discomfort.

He said: ‘I couldn’t eat properly because I couldn’t bite down on things as normal.

‘I had three teeth missing from the front of my mouth, so I began to eat and chew on the right hand side.

‘I think that this is one of the reasons why I later had problems with those lower teeth.

‘Years of chewing on just one side put them under a lot of excess stress and pressure.

‘I think gum disease also played a part, and that was never treated because I wasn’t able to get an appointment with a dentist, even for a check-up.’

Mr Lakey navigated life with his three missing front teeth for fifteen years, and remembers feeling embarrassed to laugh or smile, particularly around strangers who might judge him for his gappy ‘crackhead’ smile.

In 2015, twenty years after losing his first tooth, Mr Lakey paid a private dentist in Bromley, Kent, to fit a plate for his upper jaw.

But shortly afterwards, the trouble with his lower teeth began. 

In 2020, five years after removing his lower teeth, Mr Lakey decided to invest in himself and flew out to Turkey for a £6,000 smile makeover at renowned clinic Dentakay.

He took out a loan to cover the costs, which were a fraction of the £28,000 he had been quoted in the UK for equivalent treatment.

‘The dentists there removed all my remaining teeth and fitted implants, I have four on the top and six on the bottom and my porcelain veneers attach on to them,’ he said.

‘I’ve never had any pain from them at all, and I look after them the same way I would as if they were my natural teeth, except I don’t need to floss them as they are all one plate!’

Next year, Mr Lakey will marry his fiance Jane Callow, 53, and he can’t wait to smile proudly for the photographer.

He said: ‘My new teeth make me feel like I’ve got a new life now.

 ‘I can eat whatever I want to eat, I’m not ashamed to laugh, and speak to people.

‘At work I go to meetings and I’m not bothered about how I look.

‘My teeth don’t look overly white, they don’t look unnatural.’

Mr Lakey’s first hand warning against the horrors of DIY dentistry comes as views of dangerous ‘ToothTok’ videos soar.

A leading dentist has warned that these social media dental care trends—including using rubber bands to straighten teeth, and nail files to straighten up chipped edges—are ruining people’s smiles, and putting their oral health at risk.

Dentakay Founder, Dr Gülay Akay, said: ‘Unfortunately, many of these trends risk being actively harmful, and we’re seeing patients who have tried them and learned the hard way.

‘It really isn’t a good idea to use rubber bands in your mouth or create your own whitening mixtures at home.

‘Not every trend is safe for your oral health. Remember, teeth aren’t just for aesthetics – they serve critical biological and functional roles.

‘Always consult a dentist before trying anything seen online. These so-called ‘hacks’ often carry more risks than benefits.’