Four councils, one of them checkable
Dental specialties, and who certifies them
Everyone advertising dental work in Mexico says "certified". Almost nobody says by whom. These pages name the council for each specialty and, more usefully, say exactly what that council publishes, because a credential nobody can look up is an adjective.
General dentists
Routine and restorative dentistry: crowns, fillings, root canals, extractions and dentures. Most dental tourism is this work, not specialist surgery.
Publishes a name on a register, with no number or expiry
Endodontists
Root canal treatment and retreatment, including teeth that a general dentist has already tried to save.
Publishes a name on a register, with no number or expiry
Prosthodontists
Rebuilding a bite: full mouth restoration, implant-supported bridges, All-on-4 and All-on-6 cases.
Publishes a name on a register, with no number or expiry
Oral and maxillofacial surgeons
Surgical work on the jaw and face: bone grafts, sinus lifts, impacted extractions and implant placement in difficult bone.
Publishes certificate number and expiry, so it can be re-checked
Why this list is short
Mexican dentistry has no single specialty registry. Medicine does: CONACEM covers 47 councils and 121 specialties through one public interface. Dentistry has exactly one council inside it, for oral and maxillofacial surgery, and everything else certifies through separate bodies that each publish differently, or do not publish at all.
So this list contains the councils whose registers were found and read, and leaves out the ones that could not be. That is a smaller list than a competitor would print. It is also the only version of the list that survives a patient clicking through to check.
Questions patients actually ask
Why are there only four?
Because four is the number whose certifying council was found, read and confirmed to publish a directory. Councils for orthodontics, periodontics and pediatric dentistry are said to exist, but searching for their registers returned course adverts and forum threads rather than anything checkable. Naming a council without having found what it publishes would be a claim, and this site exists to be the opposite of that. They go in when a register is found.
Which of these can I verify myself?
One: oral and maxillofacial surgery. It certifies through CONACEM, which publishes a certificate number and both validity dates, so the check can be repeated. The other three publish a name on a register with no number and no expiry, which is real but weaker, and each page says so in those words.
Is my dentist unqualified if they are not on one of these registers?
No, and it would be wrong to read it that way. Specialty certification in Mexico is voluntary, and the credential that makes dental practice legal is the cédula profesional, which is separate and which this site checks for every listing. A certification is additional evidence, not the baseline.