Dentists are juggling a lot. You’re a clinician, a business owner, an employer, and a marketer all at once. By the time you get to thinking about your website copy or what to post on social media, you just want it done.

That’s not an excuse. But it is why so many dentists end up with a college complaint over something they didn’t even know was a problem.

We sat down with John McIntyre, a certified specialist in health law and co-founder of McIntyre Szabo PC, to talk through the dental marketing mistakes he sees most often and what they actually cost dentists.

John has represented health care professionals across Ontario for over a decade, including cases that have gone all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. He also teaches public health law at Queen’s University.

What he shared was a lot more practical, and a lot more urgent, than most dentists expect.

According to John, the number one issue isn’t bad intentions. It’s not knowing the rules exist in the first place.

“It’s rarely that dentists are intentionally trying to break the rules,” he told us. “It’s often that they haven’t really looked into it, or didn’t understand what they were doing was offside.”

Here are the four areas he sees come up most often:

Phrases like “painless dentistry,” “guaranteed results,” or “risk-free treatment” are not allowed under RCDSO advertising guidelines. They create unrealistic expectations. A dentist might think it’s just good marketing copy. The college sees it as misleading.

This one comes up constantly. A general dentist who does a lot of implants might call themselves an implant specialist. A dentist who offers some orthodontic services might let that language creep into their website. Both are offside. Ontario only recognizes 11 dental specialties, and using language that suggests you’re part of one when you’re not is a serious violation.

Running a draw where the winner gets a gift card? Offering a discount to encourage a patient to come in? These kinds of promotional incentive programs can easily cross into conflict of interest territory under the professional misconduct guidelines. The exception is small, nominal items directly connected to dental care, like the toothbrush and toothpaste patients take home after a visit. Those are specifically written into the regulations as acceptable.

If you advertise a fee, it has to be the maximum fee for all services included, unless otherwise specified. Dentists sometimes describe fees in a way that leaves out certain charges, and the college has been increasingly strict about this. It’s not just an advertising issue either. John points out that the college now connects fee transparency directly to informed consent, so getting it wrong can lead to complaints on two fronts.

John shared a case that made it to the discipline committee. A dentist was listed on his clinic’s website as a specialist in orthodontics. He wasn’t. He hadn’t put it there himself. His web designer had added it, and he simply hadn’t caught it.

His defense was straightforward: it was an honest mistake, he never told patients he was an orthodontist, and nobody was harmed. The discipline panel didn’t accept it.

The outcome: a six-week license suspension, a formal reprimand, mandatory courses, two years of college-supervised advertising approval, and $15,000 in costs. All because of a single line on a website he hadn’t reviewed carefully enough.

The rule is clear: dentists are responsible for what is published about them online, even if they didn’t write it themselves. Not knowing it was there is not a defense.

John walked us through specific categories of phrases that trip dentists up:

This one caught us off guard in the conversation. When a patient has insurance that covers 80% of a treatment, a lot of dentists will quietly waive the remaining 20% as a goodwill gesture. It feels harmless. It’s actually insurance fraud.

The reason: if you waive the patient’s portion but still bill the insurer for the full amount, you’re giving the patient a 100% discount while the insurer gets none. The rule is that any discount has to be applied proportionally to both the patient and the insurance company. If you’re giving the patient a 20% discount, the insurer gets the same 20% discount.

Most dentists doing this aren’t trying to commit fraud. They’re trying to be kind. But the college doesn’t distinguish between intent and outcome on this one.

Every dentist knows how much Google reviews matter. They build trust, they influence decisions, and for a lot of patients, they’re the first thing they look at before booking an appointment. But John sees two review-related issues come up regularly that most dentists don’t anticipate.

Whether it’s asking friends and family who’ve never visited to leave a review, or using bots to inflate your rating, fake reviews are a serious compliance violation. John has had clients who had to go back and match every single Google review to an actual patient record to prove they were legitimate.

And that’s harder than it sounds, a lot of patients leave reviews under a username or a nickname rather than their real name, which doesn’t mean the review is fake, it just makes it really difficult to connect the dots and prove it’s genuine when the college comes asking.

And contrary to what some dentists assume, these complaints usually don’t come from patients. They come from competitors. If a practice that spent years earning 50 genuine reviews sees a competitor jump to 400 five-star reviews in 18 months, they notice. And they write in.

The instinct to defend yourself publicly after a bad review is understandable. But John has seen dentists accidentally breach patient privacy in their responses by disclosing information the patient never made public. One dentist, trying to be respectful, addressed a reviewer by their full last name. The reviewer had only used their first name in the review. That small act of formality was technically a privacy violation.

The safest approach: keep responses generic, professional, and focused on your commitment to patient care. Never reference specific treatment details, appointment history, or anything that confirms the person was actually your patient.

This is the part of the conversation that’s most relevant for any dentist working with an outside dental marketing team.

When it comes to regulatory complaints, the RCDSO only regulates dentists. Not marketing agencies, not staff members, not web designers. If something non-compliant goes out under your name, the college comes after you. The fact that an agency wrote it doesn’t change that.

The regulations are explicit: dentists can be held accountable for advertising they cause or permit, directly or indirectly. That’s a wide net.

John’s practical advice: do periodic audits of your own website and marketing materials. Make sure anyone working on your marketing has read and understands the RCDSO advertising guidelines. And get final approval on anything before it goes live. You don’t want to discover a problem three months after it’s been indexed by Google.

He also makes the point that working with a dental-specific marketing agency matters. A general marketing agency might think the most compelling thing they can do is call you the best dentist in the city. They won’t know that phrase is exactly what the college is looking for in a complaint.

John wrote about this in the Ontario Dentist Journal after seeing it come up repeatedly before the RCDSO. Third-party programs that promise new patients in exchange for payment are becoming more common. And many of them are structured in ways that put dentists in violation of the conflict of interest guidelines.

The core issue is that many of these programs involve paying patients, directly or indirectly, to join a new practice. That’s considered a rebate, which is specifically prohibited.

The fact that other dentists are using the same program is not a defense. The RCDSO can’t regulate those organizations because they’re not dentists. So instead, they make examples of the dentists who sign up with them.

John’s recommendation: if you’re considering any kind of third-party referral arrangement, have a lawyer review the contract before you sign anything.

If the college receives a complaint or identifies an issue on their own, you’ll get a notice by email or mail asking you to respond, usually within 30 to 35 days. Extensions are easy to get, so don’t panic about the timeline.

The approach John recommends in that response: show that you understand what went wrong, explain why it happened, and demonstrate clearly that you’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The college is looking for what they call “governability,” basically evidence that you’re someone who takes the rules seriously and can be trusted to follow them going forward.

Most advertising complaints resolve at that initial stage, either with no further action or with a course requirement and a monitoring period. The cases that escalate to full discipline hearings, with possible suspension or license restrictions, tend to involve either clear intent to deceive or a pattern of repeated violations.

One important note: if you’ve already been through a marketing complaint before, your second or third one is going to be treated very differently. The bar for “I didn’t know” gets a lot higher after the first time.

John’s practical checklist for staying compliant:

Dental marketing compliance isn’t something most dentists think about until there’s a problem. John’s experience is that by then, it’s already more complicated and more expensive than it needed to be.

The good news is that most issues are avoidable with basic awareness. You don’t need a law degree. You need to know what the rules are, work with people who understand them, and keep an eye on what’s being said about you online.

As John put it: if you’re on the fence about a marketing claim, you’re probably already close to the line. The cost of fixing it before it becomes a problem is a lot lower than the cost of dealing with it after.