How to check a Mexican dentist's license

What the license is

In Mexico a dentist practises under a cédula profesional: a license number issued by the Dirección General de Profesiones of the federal education ministry (SEP) once a degree has been registered, and recorded in the Registro Nacional de Profesionistas.^[1] It is the one credential every legitimately practising dentist in the country has, whatever else is framed on the wall, and it belongs to the person, not the clinic.

A general dentist holds a cédula for the degree of cirujano dentista. A registered specialist holds a second cédula, a cédula de especialidad, for the specialty degree: orthodontics, endodontics, periodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery and the like.^[1] Clinic websites often present every dentist as a specialist. If a dentist is described as one, ask for the specialty cédula number. A specialist title backed only by the general cédula means the specialty is not registered with SEP, whatever courses sit behind it.

How the lookup works

The registry search is linked from the federal cédula page^[1] and lives at the SEP registry site.^[2] It takes a name or a cédula number and returns the degree registered under it and the institution that granted it, so three things can be matched against the clinic's website: the person's full name, the degree, and the school the clinic says they attended.

The catch: in our tests the registry did not respond at all from connections in the United States, and the federal page in front of it answers automated requests with a bot challenge.^[1][2] Expect to need one of these instead:

• Ask the clinic for a screenshot of each dentist's registry entry with the number, name and degree visible. A clinic that prints cédula numbers on its site usually has these to hand; one that hesitates is telling you something.
• Run the search from Mexico. A phone on a Mexican network, or a friend in the country, can open the registry. Do it before the first appointment, not after.
• Ask to see the physical cédula. It is a card or certificate the dentist holds; the number on it should match the one on the website.

Reading the numbers on a clinic's website

• A number beside each named dentist is the right shape. Those are the clinics this site marks as showing license numbers, and each number links to the page it was read on.
• The same number under every dentist is a placeholder left in a page template, not a license. Treat the page as showing none.
• "Licensed" with no number, or a "license" from a dental association, a US society or a clinic group, is not a cédula. Membership of the American Dental Association, for example, is a subscription open to dentists abroad; it is not a license to practise anywhere.
• A US or Canadian degree does not substitute for the cédula. A dentist trained abroad must still register the degree with SEP to practise in Mexico.^[1]

What this site does and does not do

Clinic pages here show a license number only when the clinic itself prints one, and link to where it appears. The SEP registry did not answer from outside Mexico when this site was built, so nobody here has run that search for you; the register is the authority, and the steps above are how to reach it. The destination pages let you filter to clinics that show numbers, which is the natural shortlist to start the checks from.