Except in Licensure**
“There is no ‘I’ in team.”
It’s one of the earliest lessons taught in health care—usually framed as a virtue. Collaboration. Alignment. Shared responsibility. Team-based care.
Clinically, that idea has value.
Legally, it is a comforting fiction.
That reality was underscored recently in a malpractice verdict reported by The Epoch Times, in which a jury found individual clinicians liable alongside their employers after a patient sued not only a psychologist and surgeon, but also the health care entities that employed them.
What stood out was not the politics of the case, but the structure of the liability:
the team existed clinically, but responsibility remained personal.
When outcomes are questioned, when charts are scrutinized, when depositions begin, the team quietly dissolves. What remains is a name, a license number, and a signature.
In dentistry—and especially in oral and maxillofacial surgery—there is very much an “I” in licensure.
Employment Does Not Transfer Judgment
Modern dentistry increasingly lives inside systems: DSOs, hospital networks, academic centers, integrated care models. With that shift comes an implicit assumption that responsibility is somehow shared upward.
It isn’t.
Employment does not transfer professional judgment.
Policies do not carry licenses.
Protocols do not assume liability.
When a malpractice claim or board inquiry arises, the question is never:
“Was this approved by your employer?”
It is:
“Doctor, did you believe this was appropriate for this patient?”
No jury asks what the organization believed.
The Seduction of Team Comfort
Groupthink in dentistry rarely announces itself as ideology. It shows up as comfort:
- “This is how we do it here.”
- “Everyone else is doing it.”
- “Legal signed off on the template.”
- “We don’t want to be out of alignment.”
Over time, independent judgment erodes—not through coercion, but through repetition and reward. Clinicians who comply advance smoothly. Those who question slow things down.
Eventually, the questions stop.
Until they resume—under oath.
The recent case is a reminder that alignment feels safe right up until it is cross-examined.
Team-Based Care vs. Licensure Reality
This is the distinction that matters:
Team-based care is a clinical framework.
Licensure is a legal reality.
Confusing the two is where professionals get hurt.
Multidisciplinary involvement does not diffuse liability. It concentrates it. Each license holder is judged independently against their own standard of care—not the group’s consensus and not the employer’s posture.
Consensus is not consent.
Documentation is not judgment.
Alignment is not a defense.
OMFS: Where This Cuts Closest
Oral and maxillofacial surgeons operate in particularly unforgiving territory:
- deep sedation and general anesthesia
- irreversible procedures
- medically complex patients
- minors and other vulnerable populations
- overlapping dental and medical scrutiny
In these environments, the idea that the “team” provides cover is especially dangerous. When exposure appears, systems protect themselves. Policies evolve. Narratives shift.
Your license does not.
Dental boards do not discipline corporations.
They discipline dentists.
The License Is Not a Team Jersey
A professional license is not a badge of corporate membership. It is a non-delegable duty.
You are allowed—required, even—to pause, question, document dissent, and refuse to proceed when something does not sit right.
That is not insubordination.
That is professionalism.
Final Thought
There may be no “I” in team.
But there is one in license.
And that “I” is what remains when the room clears, the policies are reinterpreted, and the deposition begins.
The recent verdict should not make clinicians defensive.
It should make them deliberate.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
Don’t eat the yellow snow.
Think independently. Practice deliberately.