Dental Malpractice Examples: The Claims California Dentists Face Most

Dental malpractice examples in California include extracting the wrong tooth, causing preventable nerve damage, improperly placing dental implants, failing to diagnose serious oral conditions, and performing procedures below accepted professional standards. When negligent dental care causes an injury, affected patients may have grounds to pursue a dental malpractice claim.

Some examples of dental malpractice include:

• Wrong tooth extraction: Removing a healthy tooth instead of the tooth requiring treatment.
• Dental implant errors: Improper implant placement that causes nerve injuries, infections, or other preventable complications.
• Nerve damage: Injuries resulting from negligent extractions, injections, or oral surgery.
• Failure to diagnose dental conditions: Missing signs of serious infections, periodontal disease, or oral cancer when a reasonably competent dentist should have identified them.
• Root canal errors: Negligent treatment that results in additional damage, infection, or the need for corrective procedures.
• Anesthesia errors: Improper administration or monitoring of anesthesia that causes preventable harm.

Not every dental complication qualifies as malpractice. In California, patients generally must establish that their dentist failed to meet the applicable standard of care and that this failure caused an injury.

If you experienced an unexpected injury after dental treatment, a dental malpractice attorney can review your records, evaluate the circumstances of your case, and help determine whether you may be entitled to compensation.

Key Takeaways

• The Dental Board of California names eight common reasons for complaints, and most of them are not clinical mishaps.
• The Board receives an average of around 3,568 complaints a year, a figure that has held steady.
• It triages them by urgency, and general quality of care sits in the routine tier rather than the highest one.
• Before deciding whether a complaint is substantiated, the Board obtains a dental consultant’s opinion — the regulator will not assess care on the complaint alone either.
• A complaint category is not a claim. The two are different processes with different thresholds and different outcomes.

Two Different Lists Answer This Question

The first is a list of things that can go wrong in a dental surgery. It is clinical, it is compiled from treatment, and it tells you what is possible rather than what is contested.

The second is a list of what people actually complain about, published by the body that receives the complaints. It is administrative rather than clinical, it is specific to California, and it is checkable.

Only the second is evidence of anything. A list of adverse outcomes is not a list of claims, because a poor result and a departure from the standard of care are different things — which is the threshold question our page on California dental malpractice claims addresses.

What the Regulator Says It Commonly Receives

The Dental Board of California’s published overview of its enforcement programme lists the common reasons for complaints against its licensees:

• Quality of care
• Substance use or abuse
• Improper advertising
• Fraud
• Sexual misconduct
• Infection control
• False or fictitious name use
• Unlicensed activity

What stands out is how much of that list has nothing to do with a procedure going wrong. Advertising, fraud, licensing and business-name issues are conduct and compliance matters. Only the first category is what most people mean when they search for examples of dental malpractice.

That is worth sitting with. The regulator’s caseload is not primarily composed of dramatic clinical failures, and a page that presents such failures as the typical picture is describing the exception.

How Those Complaints Are Sorted

The Board triages by urgency rather than by subject, and the tiers are revealing. According to the California Senate Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee’s background paper on the Dental Board:

• Urgent covers patient death, sexual misconduct, pharmaceutical or substance abuse, physical or mental incapacity, and unlicensed activity.
• High covers negligence or incompetence, physical or mental abuse without injury, prescription-related allegations, and unlicensed activity.
• Routine covers general quality of care, billing fraud, patient abandonment, documentation and records, and conviction notifications.

Note where the two care-related categories land. Negligence or incompetence is treated as high priority. General quality of care — the broader category most complaints about treatment fall into — is routine. The same underlying subject is handled at two different speeds depending on how the allegation is framed.

The paper also notes that complaints about online advertising violations are becoming more frequent, which is not a trend any list of clinical examples would capture.

The Scale

The same background paper states that the Board “receives an average of 3,568 complaints” each year, and that this “has remained consistent over the past four years.” At a previous review the figure was between 3,500 and 4,000. The Board’s own enforcement overview describes its intake unit receiving approximately 4,000 pieces of correspondence a year.

Those are complaints against licensees across the whole state and across every category above, not claims brought against dentists. The distinction matters, and the next section is about it.

Why the Regulator Also Needs an Opinion

One detail in the Board’s enforcement process is worth knowing, because it mirrors something in a civil claim.

When a complaint arrives, the Board’s intake unit collects the dental records relating to it and obtains a dental consultant’s opinion before deciding whether the complaint is substantiated. Substantiated cases are forwarded to investigations; unsubstantiated ones are closed.

So the regulator does not assess care from the complaint alone either. It gets the records and asks a professional. A claim requires the same thing for the same reason — whether treatment met the standard is a professional judgment, not something that can be read off an account of what happened.

What a Complaint Is Not

A complaint to the Board and a claim are separate routes with separate purposes, and the difference is not procedural detail.

The Board’s jurisdiction is over licensees. Its outcomes are disciplinary — citations, reprimands, probation, surrender or revocation of a licence. It states that refunds and monetary compensation are beyond its authority, and that any action it takes has no impact on the civil remedies available to a complainant.

So the categories above describe what the regulator investigates, not what succeeds as a claim. Some complaints concern conduct that would never support a claim at all. Some conduct that would support a claim is never complained about.

What the Published Figures Do Not Show

One limitation should be stated plainly, because it is the question most people arrive with.

Neither the Board’s enforcement overview nor the legislative background paper publishes a breakdown of how many complaints fall into each category. The categories are named; the counts behind them are not. Anyone presenting a ranked list of the most common dental malpractice claims is not drawing it from these sources, and no California figures located here support such a ranking.

What can be said is narrower and better evidenced: these are the categories the regulator itself identifies, this is roughly how many complaints arrive, and this is the order of urgency they are handled in.

Talk to a California Dental Malpractice Lawyer

Whether something that happened during treatment belongs in any of these categories, and whether it supports a claim, are two different assessments — and both are made from the records rather than from the description.

Vaksman Khalfin, PC takes dental malpractice matters from across California, with Alan D. Khalfin heading that work from the San Mateo office. An initial consultation is free. Wider reading is in the California personal injury guides.

Reviewed by Alan D. Khalfin, Partner and Managing Attorney, Vaksman Khalfin, PC (admitted in California). Last reviewed: 10/15/2026