Preventing overtreatment in dentistry: causes, types and how to be avoided

Background and objectives. The aim of the study was to identify in the literature the potential causes of overtreatment in dentistry, the most frequent types of overtreatments and recommendations of how to avoid those issues. Materials and methods. A literature search was carried out in the PubMed/Medline, Web of Science and ScienceDirect databases. The search used following keywords: “overtreatment” and “dentistry” for papers published in English until June 2022. Results. 211 results were found in PubMed, 122 in Web of Science and 523 in ScienceDirect. The duplicates, the titles and the abstracts that were not related to the reviewed topic and the papers not available in full text were excluded. 27 papers were selected and included in this study. From the 27 papers selected 7 were Clinical research, 7 questionnaire-based studies, 5 case reports, 8 review articles. Conclusions: Most of the analyzed overtreatments in the literature were unintentionally performed except for those related to the financial gain and business development. The research revealed that the overtreatments or overdiagnosis were in general due directly or indirectly to the lake of knowledge of the practitioner. It is important to know and to identify the causes of possible overtreatments as early as possible and acting ethically to achieve good results in avoiding them.