{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/dentists-all-other-specialists/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Dentists, All Other Specialists",
    "soc_code": "29-1029",
    "category": "Healthcare",
    "us_employment": 5230,
    "median_annual_wage": 224990
  },
  "verdict": "SAFE",
  "risk_resistance": 87,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 16,
    "embodiment": 19,
    "liability_shield": 19,
    "trust_premium": 16,
    "judgment_accountability": 17
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Cone-beam interpretation and case documentation are genuinely being taken over by software, but incisional and brush biopsy of oral mucosa, titration of IV midazolam and propofol to a moving sedation depth, and palpation of cervical nodes for a suspicious lateral tongue lesion are the parts of the day that decide the diagnosis, which puts this at 16 rather than the 12 a radiograph-heavy specialty would earn.",
    "embodiment": "The workspace is a 40mm oral aperture on a patient who gags, bleeds and moves, with the operator also holding a mask airway, suction and cautery — no fixture, no bloodless field, no repeatability, which is why this sits at 19 and not merely in the surgical-suite band.",
    "liability_shield": "State board licensure, specialty permits for moderate/deep sedation issued per-operator after site inspection, and DEA Schedule II-IV registration all attach to a named individual who signs the sedation record and the pathology requisition; the 19 reflects that no delegation pathway exists — an assistant cannot legally hold the drug or the diagnosis.",
    "trust_premium": "Patients arrive already told they may have cancer or have failed sedation elsewhere, and consent to being rendered unconscious or to a scalpel biopsy is given to a face; the score stops at 16 rather than 19 because much of the caseload is referral-in, single-episode, and the trust is partly borrowed from the referring general dentist.",
    "judgment_accountability": "Deciding whether a persistent white patch is frictional keratosis or dysplasia warranting excision, and whether an ASA III patient with OSA should be sedated in-office or sent to hospital, are calls made on incomplete information where both over- and under-treating cause harm — 17 rather than 20 because histopathology and airway guidelines do narrow the space after the initial judgment."
  },
  "rationale": "This title covers specialists outside the named categories — oral medicine, oral pathology, dental anesthesiology, dental public health — and most of the day is millimeter-scale intraoral work, sedation management, biopsy, and lesion assessment on live patients. AI already reads radiographs and cone-beam scans competently and drafts referral letters and treatment narratives, but it cannot perform a soft-tissue biopsy, manage an airway under sedation, or accept the liability for a differential diagnosis. State dental licensure plus DEA prescribing authority makes a human signature legally mandatory, and patients in pain buy the person, not the plan.",
  "outlook": "Diagnostic imaging and paperwork get largely handed to AI within a decade, but the chair-side procedural and prescribing core stays human and demand for oral medicine specialists rises with an aging, medically complex population.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "State dental board rules explicitly requiring a licensed dental anesthesiologist (not a general dentist with a permit, and not an AI monitoring system) physically present for deep sedation/general anesthesia in pediatric dental offices — the direction several boards moved after AAPD/ADA guideline revisions and pediatric sedation death cases; also DEA prescribing rules barring algorithm-generated controlled-substance orders without an individually liable practitioner DEA number",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 1
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift as AI absorbs the routine tier: radiograph screening, CBCT reads, referral letters and narrative drafting go to software, leaving biopsy, airway rescue, ambiguous mucosal lesion workup and complex medical-comorbidity sedation planning — the residual job is almost entirely the judgment tier. Watch for oral pathology practices adopting AI pre-screening of slides (Paige/PathAI-style) while sign-out and clinico-pathologic correlation stay human",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Formal designation of these specialists as the accountable reviewer for AI-flagged findings — e.g. CMS or state Medicaid dental programs requiring a named specialist to adjudicate AI caries/lesion detection outputs used for claim approval, mirroring the payer-side AI-review disputes already litigated in medical utilization review",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Little headroom: patients already buy the person for pain and sedation. The one route is a malignancy-adjacent framing — oral cancer screening marketed and reimbursed as specialist-performed rather than AI-screened, following how dermatology resisted teledermoscopy-only triage",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 1
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "At 87 the score is near-saturated; liability_shield and embodiment have almost no room. Realistic upside is a few points from task-mix shift, not a structural change. The real risk to this title is not AI but headcount: 5,230 workers in a residual SOC bucket, where reclassification or scope expansion by general dentists with sedation permits would shrink the occupation without any dimension moving."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 4590,
        "wage": 190840
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 4490,
        "wage": 146970
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 5330,
        "wage": 147220
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 5610,
        "wage": 183300
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 4750,
        "wage": 175160
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 5250,
        "wage": 212740
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 5920,
        "wage": 227690
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 5900,
        "wage": 225770
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 5230,
        "wage": 224990
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 13.9,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}