A woman troubled by toothache pulled it out with pliers and replaced it with a fake one she bought online.
Helen Sheen from Scarborough, Yorkshire, paid £2 for the stand-in after after stumbling upon it on e-commerce platform Wish.
She pulled her tooth out with the tool as soon as she had the replacement ready, reports Yorkshire Live.
Filling the gap with glue to hold it firm, she says she has no regrets about her spot of self-dentistry.
She says her local dentist closed before the pandemic and has had trouble finding one since.
After trying to get an NHS dentist appointment, she took matters into her own hands and applied the treatment in her living room.
Mrs Sheen, who suffers from gum disease, said one of her teeth had started to come loose - and went online to come up with a plan to make things better.
Two years on, she says she doesn't regret a thing.
She explained: "I have bleeding gums every time I clean my teeth and it’s making me not want to clean them as I hate the taste of blood and all my teeth are getting wobbly.
"One in front was so wobbly it had to come out as I couldn’t eat with it so I put Elastoplast on the end of the pliers and tugged it out.
"The only thing I could think of was melting glue and moulding it into the gap. It’s been two years now.
"It’s working okay, I can actually smile without seeing a gap."
NHS England recently announced they would provide an extra £50 million for dentists to provide additional urgent care for NHS patients.
The unprecedented backlog has left dentistry "hanging by a thread" with many dentists looking to change careers or seeking early retirement.
On January 25 NHS England pledged an extra £50 million for dentists to provide additional urgent care for NHS patients.
Funding will be available until the end of March and will be paid on a sessional basis.
“Any additional funding is long overdue recognition of the huge backlogs facing NHS dentistry” said General Dental Practice Committee Chair Shawn Charlwood.
“After a decade of cuts a cash-starved service risks being offered money that can’t be spent. Hard-pressed practices are working against the clock, and many will struggle to find capacity ahead of April for this investment to make a difference.
“Until today not a penny of the government’s multi-billion-pound catch-up programme had reached dentistry. This is progress but must be just the start if we are to rebuild a service millions depend on.”
