Perhaps you may agree that society in general is somehow more tolerant of less than optimal results from dental procedures than, say standard surgery that goes wrong, and maybe this is why so many people are so unfamiliar with what dental malpractice is.
For instance who among us hasn’t heard the jokes or the deadpan skits on TV, like the one about the man who asks his dentist if his extensive bridgework is absolutely necessary, to which the dentist replies “yes it is because I just went out and bought a new Mercedes Benz for my wife”!
So why do we find it funny when there would be no humor in a joke about a surgeon performing, say an unnecessary coronary procedure solely for the sake of profit? Perhaps we find humor in it as a way of coping because who among us hasn’t questioned if some dental procedure they had done was absolutely necessary?
Fortunately attitudes are changing and one prime indicator is the fact that one recent nationally accredited study found that fully one out of seven malpractice cases filed in the U.S. directly involves dental malpractice. This in a country that is known for its high standards in dental care.
Even so, just as in medical malpractice, it was found that it’s a small minority of select practitioners who are responsible for an overwhelming percentage of the cases filed. So then what is it that qualifies as dental malpractice and how can you tell if you’ve been the victim of it? Perhaps the following list can be of some help.
- Dental insurance fraud in the form of unnecessary procedures performed solely for the sake of money.
- Misdiagnosis, or failure to detect a condition, oral disease, or malformation.
- Injuries or death that were the caused by negligence, and this can include infections, loss of taste and nerve damage.
- Lack of informed consent, and this includes performing procedures without patient consent as well as failure to notify a patient of the risks, and side effects of any given procedure.
- Delayed diagnosis, or delay in notification or treatment of a condition.
Remember that when you pay for a dental exam, the dentist who performs it is obligated by ethical standards to inform you of everything that is detected. Failure to do so means that they either missed the problem which points to incompetence, or they neglected to inform you, both of which qualify as dental malpractice.
Also if a dentist performs an invasive procedure that carries the risk of complications, such as infection then goes on vacation, and a problem does arise, that too qualifies as dental malpractice. If a dentist detects oral cancer, or a precancerous lesion and fails to act on it, that also is dental malpractice.
These are all too common issues that dental patients face, but they simply lack the formal training in the area of dentistry to know for certain whether theirs is a case of malpractice. The person they really need to talk to is dental malpractice attorney who is trained in both dentistry and law.