Dental Ethics at Chairside: Professional Obligations and Practical Applications

In the last two decades, more than ever before dentists must determine how to properly maintain their focus on ethics and professionalism in the face of powerful commercial pressures. While there is encouragement for ethical conduct within the dental profession, there is still relatively little assistance available to dentists and dental students for judging what conduct is ethically best in concrete situations. For many years, Dental Ethics at Chairside has served as an invaluable resource for tens of thousands of dentists and dentistry students, and this third edition of the gold standard in the field is thoroughly revised and updated. In addition to exploring ongoing and critical issues such as the patient-professional relationship, patients with compromised capacity, confidentiality, justice and the inadequacies of society’s health care systems, and dentistry as a business, the third edition addresses emerging ethical issues related to conflicts of interest, dental professionalism, advertising and social media, the serious indebtedness of graduating dental students, bad outcomes and bad work, the explosion of aesthetic dentistry, acquiring new skills and new technology, the impact of the market on the professional-patient relationship, and many others. The book includes fourteen realistic cases and commentary about dilemmas in dentistry, as well as online resources for further research and study.

David T. Ozar, PhD, FACD (hon), FACLM (hon), taught professional and social ethics in the Philosophy Department of Loyola University Chicago from 1972 to 2015 and was director of Loyola’s Center for Ethics and Social Justice, 1993-2006. He was the founding president of the American Society of Dental Ethics, is an honorary Fellow of the American College of Dentists, and has lectured and published widely on the ethics of the dental profession.David J. Sokol, DDS., JD, FAGD, deceased, was a dentist with decades of private practice experience and was also in the practice of dental and medical health and malpractice law in Highland Mills, New York.

Donald Patthoff, DDS, FACD, FAGD, has been a general dentist in government, non-profit, and private practice settings since 1971. He has served in many leadership roles within organized dentistry at local, state, and national levels, and in national and international ethics organizations. He is a frequent author and lecturer on dental ethics and serves as the ethics chair of the Berkeley Medical Center in Martinsburg WV and for several other organizations.