Your supervising dentist recommends treatment you believe is unnecessary. What do you do?
Whether you can navigate hierarchy without abandoning a patient. Overtreatment is a real and discussed problem in dentistry.
How to structure your answer
- 1Assume good faith first
- 2Ask privately to understand the reasoning
- 3Escalate if genuinely concerned
- 4Protect the patient throughout
- Start by assuming you may be missing something — you're the student
- Ask privately and curiously rather than accusingly
- Frame it as learning: 'help me understand the indication here'
- If genuinely convinced of harm, escalate to a course director or ethics channel
- Never undermine them in front of the patient
A strong answer
What lands
In the room, nothing. I'd never do that in front of a patient. Afterward, privately: can you walk me through the indication on eight and nine, I was reading those as watchable. I spent three years in a lab making crowns and I've seen prescriptions come in for teeth I'd have left alone, and I've also been wrong about that, because I never saw the radiographs. So I ask first, genuinely. But if he explains it and I still think we're cutting healthy tooth, it goes to the course director. I'd rather be the annoying student.
Asks privately and curiously first, with escalation actually named as the next step.
A weak answer
What most people say
I'd keep it to myself in the moment, because you never undermine your supervisor in front of a patient, and as a student I'm probably missing something clinically. Afterward I'd try to learn from it. And I'd file it away as a note about how I want to practice differently once I'm the one making the call.
The private inquiry never happens. Silence plus a mental note isn't an action.
The trap
⚠Going straight to confrontation or straight to silence. The graded skill is the middle path — private inquiry first, escalation held in reserve.
Reading it isn't the same as saying it.
Most people can explain a good answer and still fall apart saying one out loud. Admitted asks you all 100 questions in a faculty voice, records you, and scores your pace and filler words.
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