One came out its bridges from his pocket, others approached the court, lifted their lips to show necrotic or cyst-filled gums. At the trial of Lionel Guedj, a former dentist from Marseille, and his father Jean-Claude Guedj, tried since February 28 for voluntary mutilation of nearly 350 patients, the long sequence of the hearing of the civil parties has begun.

At the foot of the court, they lay down ten years of pain, expose their “wasted life”express their anger against “that butcher”. The suspects, mostly modest residents of the northern districts of Marseille, chain their testimonies, concretely illustrating “the Guedj system” described by forensic experts.

According to Pr Jacques-Henri Torres (Montpellier University Hospital), who had carried out a global expertise, “Dr. Lionel Guedj’s professional activity was entirely based on an optimal profit system which exploited the conditions of health insurance coverage to the maximum, with total disregard for the health of patients”. That “industrial policy” consisted of placing as many prostheses as possible, one of the most profitable acts, including on healthy teeth, injured by large bridges made and placed on the sly. “A prosthesis on a minor of 15 years when his growth is not even finished, it is an aberration”explained, bewildered, another expert.

The room retains a cry of amazement each time a civil party announces the number of devitalized teeth without any medical justification. This is the case when a young woman (the civil parties mostly wanted anonymity) begins her testimony: “You don’t remove 24 teeth at 18. » Beneficiary of the CMU, she had come to consult Lionel Guedj, in 2006, for problems of fragile enamel. The incomplete proof of the roots and their imperfect obturation had resulted in repeated infections of about twenty teeth. “Sixteen years that I have pain 24 hours a day, seven days a week. My life is on stand-by. When you suffer like that, you withdraw from society, you want to make yourself very small, to put yourself in a hole, so you no longer go out, even to go to work. » The young woman evokes ” shame ” When one of his bridges had, one day, fallen in the restaurant.

Trusted patients

All the delicate comments of Lionel Guedj had bamboozled them, “put under hypnosis”. A cabinet “that shone”no waiting time, a reputation, since its installation in 2005, of “do a great job”… “Tapping me on the shoulder, he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to take everything off to give you star teeth. He cut me everything during a date, I ended up with mouse teeth””, says a 50-year-old car driver. Constant that the waiting room was “e armored with people”he said to himself: ” It is good. »

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