English-speaking dentist in Medellín

You are looking for an English-speaking dentist in Medellín. This page is who we are, where we work and how we price things, so that you can decide most of it before you write to anybody.

Why an English-speaking dentist matters more than it sounds

Almost every clinic in El Poblado will tell you it speaks English. Most of them do — at the front desk.

The question is whether the person with their hands in your mouth is the person you have been talking to. Here, you write in English and you are answered in English by the clinic, and the specialist who treats you is the one who explained the plan.

It matters because the conversations that decide how treatment turns out are not the pleasant ones. They are: this tooth can be saved and that one cannot. This will need a second trip. What you are asking for is not what I would do, and here is why. Those are the exchanges that go wrong in a second language, and nodding through them is how people end up agreeing to something other than what they wanted.

The prices are on the pages

Every treatment on this site carries its price, in Colombian pesos, on its own page. Where it is a range, we explain what moves it. Where the figure genuinely depends on an examination, we say that instead of inventing one.

We quote in pesos rather than dollars because the exchange rate moves, and a dollar figure published today is wrong by next quarter. You can convert it in ten seconds, and at least you will be converting a real number.

We are probably not the cheapest

Medellín has dentistry at every price, and some of it is very cheap. We are not competing there. We use the materials and the laboratory we use, and that has a floor underneath it.

Among specialists, we are likely to be one of the more affordable choices in the city. Against the cheapest clinic in Medellín we will lose on price, and we would rather say so here than have you find out halfway through a quotation.

The advice costs us nothing either way

This runs through every page on this site, and it is the part we would ask you to check rather than take our word for.

A ceramic onlay and a crown cost the same here, so when we tell you a tooth does not need a crown, that advice is not making us anything. A post adds no strength to a tooth, so we rarely place one, even though it is billable. And sometimes the honest recommendation is to take the tooth out and place an implant rather than rebuild something that will fracture later.

We would rather say those things at the examination than after it.

Our team

Eight specialists, each in one field. You will be told the name of the dentist doing your work before your first appointment, and that is the person who does it.

The clinic

Five fully equipped treatment rooms, on the third floor of Mall Palms Avenue, in El Poblado.

Five rooms is the number that lets more than one specialist see you on the same day, which is what makes a treatment plan fit into a trip rather than into a year.

The equipment, and what it actually does

Every clinic lists its equipment. A list proves nothing on its own, so here is what these three change about the appointment you will actually sit through.

How the instruments are handled

Every instrument that goes into your mouth is cleaned, sealed in a pouch and sterilised in an autoclave. It stays in that pouch until the moment it is used, which is why what arrives at the chair comes out of a sealed bag rather than out of a drawer.

Anything meant to be used once is used once. That is not a line written for this page: there is a sign on the wall saying so, in Spanish, and you can see a corner of it in the photograph above.

And none of it is self-declared. In Colombia a clinic cannot legally open its doors without habilitación — a licence from the health authority that sets the standards for sterilisation, clinical waste, equipment and record-keeping, and that is inspected rather than taken on trust. If that sounds bureaucratic from the inside, it is, and that is the point of it.

We mention it because it is the question nobody asks out loud before flying somewhere to have treatment, and because it is checkable.

What we do

Eight specialties, each with its own specialist. Every one has a page with what it involves and what it costs, in pesos.

Medellín, and where we sit in it

We are on Avenida Las Palmas, in El Poblado. What that means depends on which of the two reasons brought you to this page.

If you are flying in

Las Palmas is the road between José María Córdova international airport and the city. We are on it, which puts us 30 to 45 minutes from arrivals and on the way in rather than across town.

El Poblado is also where most visitors stay, so wherever you book, the clinic is probably closer than you expect. You can leave a two-hour appointment and be back at the hotel, or at lunch, without crossing Medellín.

If you live here

Roughly, by car, outside the worst of the traffic:

Parque Lleras and Provenza	8 minutes
El Tesoro	10 minutes
Centro Comercial Santa Fe	15 minutes
Laureles	25 minutes
José María Córdova airport	30 – 45 minutes

Those are honest estimates rather than promises. Medellín traffic has its own opinions, and Las Palmas at six in the evening is one of them.

There is parking in the building, so you can drive in rather than circling for a space. Getting here, step by step, including a short video of the route in.

The city itself

Medellín sits at about 1,500 metres in a valley in the Andes, and the temperature barely moves across the year — mid-twenties in the day, cool at night, every month. There is no season that makes recovering from a treatment uncomfortable, which is not something every destination can say.

It is also, unglamorously, a practical place to have dental work done: direct flights from several cities in the United States, a large English-speaking community already living here, and a cost of living that makes staying the extra days for laboratory work less painful than it would be elsewhere.