Why some of your fellow oral health pros still cling to treatment-first (and how to help them break free)

When we chat within our bubble of human-first oral care pros, it is obvious: prevention beats intervention every time. Yet somehow, many are still stuck in outdated, reactive workflows. Why?

This article dives into the reasons. Maybe none of them apply to you (congrats, you are already winning). Maybe one or two will help you level up prevention in your practice. Or perhaps they will open entirely new perspectives, and at the very least give you a little ego boost for being ahead of the curve. Better yet, understanding these reasons could help you guide your peers toward smarter, prevention-focused care.

Four reasons that are keeping the industry stuck

There are real structural, cultural, and systemic barriers that make prevention harder to prioritise. But naming them is the first step towards changing them, so here are four of the most common traps:

1. The system rewards treatment

Procedures like fillings and crowns are easy to bill. Prevention? Much harder to quantify and price. Time spent on education, patient coaching, or early intervention rarely appears on the invoice. Despite the importance of these actions, prevention often feels like a time-consuming extra, not a revenue-driving core service