That was money well spent - not!

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I've had on and off nasty pain in my jaw and face that's been keeping me fairly sleepless.
Assuming, as you do, I needed dentistry (shudder) I've saved for a couple of months to get a tooth done.
After prodding and poking and basically climbing down my throat with a suitcase full of evil tools, they decided it isn't dental.
My teeth are fine.
It's probably trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve pain I must learn to live with.
So it hurts more after they tried to invert my head.
And I paid $325 to learn this.
I should have bought a bottle of scotch and numbed the pain for a tenth of the price.

We do have emergency services, but they are heavily booked and a long distance from me.
They offer short appointments with a payment plan, it adds up to about the same including travel for me.
I was counting on a quick extraction.

Dental care isn't really covered in the UK, either.

Even getting a simple check-up appointment can literally take years.
And, they often won't extract even severely nasty teeth that are impacting into (destroying) the healthy tooth next to them. So, then both teeth end up having to be removed privately in the end.

This is why I pay extortionate fees to see the local private dentist.... but even then, you have to make quite a ruckus if you want to have anything done without having to wait for months (or more) for the first appointment, and then yet more months of waiting in-between each thing that needs to be done to your teeth.

For Trigeminal Neuralgia, my doctors claim that people should hold their nose closed and then blow through it.
Frankly though, I have only found that doing this makes things worse.

And well, my local doctors are imbeciles.

To begin with they tried to claim that I was getting it due to having uneven teeth, and pestered me to ask the dentist to "file down [my] teeth on one side" .... thinking that it would take me years, to even get talking to the NHS dentist about it.

Through coincidence, I happened to have an appointment with the NHS dentist (arranged about a year previously) for the week after the doctors said that, though... and the dentist who I saw agreed with me, that the doctors are clearly imbeciles, and that only a criminally dangerous dentist would ever follow such ridiculous advice.

The private dentist (who I saw some months later) was visibly shocked by the very notion of filing down a whole load of somebody's teeth, and agrees that my doctors are a pack of incompetent imbeciles to be telling people they should be getting that done.

The doctors seemed somewhat startled to see me back the week after they said that, telling them that the NHS dentist agreed with me that it was a stupid suggestion ; and that they were refusing to do something so incompetent to my teeth.

To begin with the doctors claimed that I was lying (which is ridiculous) , but I just said that the doctor was full of crap and should phone the NHS dentist to hear what they have to say about it ; because she was appalled that the doctor was giving out such terrible advice.

So, the doctor sheepishly backed down (without apologising for falsely accusing me of being a liar) and since then they just tell me to do the stupid nose-puffing thing for trigeminal neuralgia ; which does no good at all, but when I told the doctors that - then they all just say, "oh , well that's what we tell people to do when they get like that. You need to do that mechanical action 40 times a day or more."

But it just makes things worse to do that, in my experience.
I really don't recommend doing it much, if at all.

I call it extortion. The dentist should pay you, after all it's your teeth they're taking and it's you putting up with the pain too. I begrudge paying for this service.

You had no way of knowing. It sucks to have to pay, but at least you know now. What if it had been something treatable, or something more serious?