Routine dental X-rays are not backed by evidence

Not just x-rays: "As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-tro...

Dentistry might be the wild west full of snake oil salesmen compared to medicine but it also doesn't have nearly as many middle men and additional parties perverting incentives and creating hell for patients that medicine does.

One thing is evidence based medicine, another just simple greed: I like this older study from Switzerland where they sent the same healthy guy to 180 dentists, about 30% of whom performed unnecessary treatments, often on different teeth.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036573