[mulvya]

Long form journalism tends to frame articles around individual narratives.

However, the article does have this:

Studies that explicitly focus on overtreatment in dentistry are rare, but a recent field experiment provides some clues about its pervasiveness. A team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, asked a volunteer patient with three tiny, shallow cavities to visit 180 randomly selected dentists in Zurich. The Swiss Dental Guidelines state that such minor cavities do not require fillings; rather, the dentist should monitor the decay and encourage the patient to brush regularly, which can reverse the damage. Despite this, 50 of the 180 dentists suggested unnecessary treatment. Their recommendations were incongruous: Collectively, the overzealous dentists singled out 13 different teeth for drilling; each advised one to six fillings. Similarly, in an investigation for Reader’s Digest, the writer William Ecenbarger visited 50 dentists in 28 states in the U.S. and received prescriptions ranging from a single crown to a full-mouth reconstruction, with the price tag starting at about $500 and going up to nearly $30,000.

[bigDinosaur]

Are the dental guidelines any good though in the sense of people actually brushing their teeth and eating properly so as to reverse the damage? Dentists are one of the few professions I've found that will happily chastise their customers, and often rightly so, for failing to adhere to proper dental maintenance. In that case I could understand just going ahead with a filling even if technically and ideally the decay could be reversed, simply because most people probably won't do what's necessary.