Who writes this, and who does not

No dentist has reviewed this site

There is no dentist on this masthead, no clinical reviewer, and no advisory board. You will not find "medically reviewed" or "dentally reviewed" anywhere here, because it would not be true. We have not put a reviewer into the structured data either, where a search engine would read it and a reader would not.

That is a real limitation and we would rather state it than dress it. It means this site is good at one narrow thing — reading published documents carefully and reporting what they say — and is not qualified to do the thing you might most want, which is to tell you what is happening in your own tooth. That takes an examination and an X-ray, by somebody licensed to interpret them.

Where the numbers come from

Every dollar figure on this site comes from one of three published payer fee schedules, named on the page that uses it, linked to the document itself, and dated with the day we read it. Every pound figure comes from an NHS page with its own review date printed on it. Nothing is averaged, rounded up, or carried over from somebody else's article.

Three things keep that honest rather than decorative:

• A facts file lists every fragile figure on the site with its source and read date.
• A check called figure-guard pulls every currency amount and percentage out of the content and fails if one of them is not in that list. It exists because it is genuinely easy to write an invented fee that reads exactly like a real one — a sibling site in this portfolio shipped a draft that did.
• The charts are built from the same data module as the tables beside them, and refuse to render if the page stops saying what they draw. A price edited in one place and forgotten in another stops the build.

What is deliberately missing

A national average price for a root canal in the United States. We looked, found no free primary source, and print nothing rather than something softened. How long a treated tooth lasts: no sourced figure, so no figure. A success rate: the endodontists' professional body publishes one on its own patient pages without a study we could open, and an unsourced percentage from an interested party is not evidence, so it is not here.

No before-and-after photographs. No patient stories. No practice, chain or group named, ranked or linked, anywhere on this site — not once, in any chapter.

How this is paid for

Three commercial links, all on the cost page, introduced by a note above them. The full arrangement, including the two programmes we turned down and why, is on the page about how this is paid for. We would rather lose the revenue than put a teledentistry link on the chapter about dental emergencies.

Corrections

The most useful thing anyone sends us is a link to a newer version of a fee schedule, or a line we have read wrongly. Both go to [email protected] and both get fixed at the source file, so the facts file, the tables and the charts move together.