Almost every dental marketing guide you will find online treats dental patient testimonials as the foundation of the funnel. Collect the story, film the patient, put it above the fold. In Ontario, publishing that material is an act of professional misconduct, and the mechanism that makes it one reaches a great deal further than the testimonial slider.
Can a dentist in Canada use patient testimonials?
In Ontario, no. The Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario states in its Practice Advisory on Professional Advertising that a dentist must not include “testimonials or any statement that can only be verified by a person’s personal feelings or views” in advertising material.
Dentistry is regulated provincially, so the governing instrument differs across the country. If you practise outside Ontario, confirm your own college’s position before applying any of this. What follows is Ontario’s, quoted from the Canadian dental advertising rules as they are actually written.
Why are dental patient testimonials restricted?
This is the part worth understanding, because it explains far more than the testimonial rule itself.
Ontario Regulation 853/93, made under the Dentistry Act, 1991, defines acts of professional misconduct. Section 2, paragraph 60 makes it misconduct to publish advertising which includes information that “is not verifiable by facts or can only be verified by a person’s personal feelings, beliefs, opinions or interpretations”.
Testimonials are not named in that clause. They do not need to be. A patient saying that you changed their life, that they finally feel confident, or that the team made them comfortable, is a statement verifiable only by that person’s feelings and interpretations. It falls inside the clause by its nature.
Once you see that the rule is about verifiability rather than about testimonials specifically, you can predict what else it catches without needing a list. Anything on your website that a stranger could not confirm by checking facts is a candidate.
What else does the verifiability clause catch?
More of a typical dental website than most owners expect. None of the following is a testimonial, and all of it sits against the same clause.
- “Our patients love us.” Verifiable only by feelings.
- “A warm, caring environment where you will feel at ease.” An interpretation, and it also promises a result.
- “Gentle, compassionate care.” Not confirmable by facts.
- “You will leave smiling.” An expectation of a favourable outcome, which paragraph 60 prohibits separately.
- “Trusted by families across the city.” Unverifiable, and arguably comparative.
Paragraph 60 also prohibits advertising that “makes comparisons with another practice or member or would be reasonably regarded as suggestive of uniqueness or superiority”, and advertising “likely to create expectations of favourable results or to appeal to the public’s fears”. Most copy that breaches the testimonial rule tends to breach at least one of those too.
Are Google reviews the same as a testimonial?
Not identical, and the distinction is where practices most want a clear answer. A review left by a patient on an independent platform is published by that platform, not by the practice. A testimonial reproduced on your own website is published by you, and the regulation applies to material “published, displayed, distributed or used” in relation to your practice, “whether by you directly or by someone on your behalf”.
That phrase does a lot of work. Embedding a review feed on your homepage, quoting a review in an ad, or having an agency put review cards on a landing page are all acts of publishing by or on behalf of the practice.
The honest position: soliciting and receiving reviews on an independent platform is a different activity from republishing them as marketing material, and the second is where the risk concentrates. Before building any campaign around review content, confirm your own college’s current position. The RCDSO offers a review service and its advisory states the College “will offer advice about any proposed advertisement”.
Before replacing anything, it is worth separating the two activities. Asking patients for reviews on an independent platform is dental reputation management, and it is a different discipline from advertising. What follows is about what you publish yourself.
What can a dental practice publish instead of testimonials?
A great deal, and it tends to be more persuasive to a patient who is genuinely deciding.
- Verifiable facts about the practice. Years in operation, technologies you actually own, languages spoken, accessibility, parking, whether you accept emergencies, and how quickly you answer the phone.
- Real explanation of the treatment. What the procedure involves, what recovery is like, what the alternatives are and what happens if a patient does nothing. This is relevant to an informed choice, which is the standard the regulation is built around.
- Process transparency. What a first visit looks like, minute by minute. For an anxious patient this does the emotional work a testimonial was doing, without making a single unverifiable claim.
- Facts about outcomes you can actually evidence. Handle with care and confirm before publishing, but a documented, checkable figure is a different category from a patient’s feelings.
The practices that adapt best to these rules stop trying to sound reassuring and start being genuinely informative. It is a harder brief and it converts better, because the patient was looking for information and everyone else gave them adjectives.
Who is liable if an agency publishes a testimonial for you?
You are. The advisory defines a professional advertisement as material related to your practice which is published, displayed, distributed or used “whether by you directly or by someone on your behalf”. Professional misconduct attaches to the licensed practitioner. An agency that does not know these rules is not a shield, and its contract will not transfer the College’s jurisdiction over your licence.
This is why so much freely available advice is not merely unhelpful in Canada but actively hazardous. The tactic is standard in the United States, it is recommended everywhere, and here it is the dentist who answers for it. That gap runs through almost every American tactic a Canadian practice is tempted to copy. A closely related trap sits in how you describe your own expertise, where the words available to you are narrower than most practices realise.
The practices that adapt to this fastest tend to be the ones who stop trying to sound reassuring. A patient choosing a dentist is doing research, not looking for comfort, and the rule that removes your adjectives is quietly pushing you toward the thing that actually persuades them. That reframing is most of the work in how we approach a Canadian practice.
This article describes advertising and privacy rules as they applied on the review date shown. Regulations change and vary by province. This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm anything you intend to rely on with your own regulatory college.
Speak to a dental marketing specialist