Newport Beach celebrity dentist’s license suspended amid allegations of negligence

A Newport Beach celebrity dentist whose work was featured on the former Fox reality TV makeover show “The Swan” has been at least temporarily barred from practicing dentistry following allegations that she performed shoddy procedures on patients.

The Dental Board of California suspended Sherri Worth’s license Feb. 3 pending a disciplinary hearing, according to state documents.

A dental board complaint filed Feb. 1 is based on allegations by six patients that Worth committed repeated acts of negligence, fraud, incompetence, overdiagnosis and excessive treatment. The patients were not identified by name.

Worth has been licensed as a dentist in California since May 1995. Her website, which has been taken down, previously featured testimonials from stars such as Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and actress Anna Kendrick.

Worth’s attorney declined to comment Monday through a receptionist who answered the phone at his law office.

According to the complaint, Worth charged two patients more than $5,000 each for laser surgery on gum tissue that she didn’t perform, digitally altered X-rays to cover up problems she caused to a patient’s teeth and performed expensive and unnecessary restorations on healthy teeth.

The complaint states that by improperly placing restorations on teeth, she demonstrated “a gross lack of clinical skill and diagnostic ability.”

Worth’s case caught the dental board’s attention in 2012 when a malpractice insurer notified the agency that it had paid $641,441 to a patient who won a judgment against Worth. The woman, who saw Worth in 2009 in hopes of fixing a “gummy smile,” said she experienced intolerable pain after Worth put crowns or porcelain veneers on 22 of the patient’s teeth.

The patient filed a civil suit against the dentist, alleging that she botched $46,000 worth of work.

According to a complaint the dental board filed in 2015, many of the fixtures were ill-fitted, and in some cases, Worth removed solid dental work to attach them.

According to the complaint, Worth improperly shaved off portions of the woman’s gums with a laser, enabling food and bacteria to lodge around her teeth.

“[Worth] observed the horrible gingivitis in the areas she treated with laser surgery, and the perfectly healthy gum tissue in the rest of the mouth, and inexplicably continued to insist the patient’s oral hygiene was the problem,” the complaint states.

After learning of the complaint in 2015, Worth defended herself in a statement. “These allegations are more than 5 years old and they originated as a result of professional jealousy by a competitor,” she said in part. “Highly qualified independent experts have found no negligence on my part. ... I am confident that when the whole story comes out and the final decision is rendered, I will be vindicated.”

The dental board accuses Worth of altering or hiding records in connection with the lawsuit.

According to the board, Worth claimed the medical documents were lost in a flood or computer crash, and when she did provide the information, “they were written in such a biased manner as to be untrustworthy.”

Attorneys for the two sides in the civil suit scheduled an expert to examine the records, but two days before the meeting, Worth said she had spilled Diet Coke on the documents, which “made the records unreviewable by the document examiners,” the complaint states.

The 2015 complaint has been updated several times as more patients have come forward.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

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