Editorial policy

Authorship and review

Every clinical page identifies the sources it relies on and states plainly that it has not been reviewed by a licensed dental professional. A page does not earn a reviewer's name, a review date or a medical-review badge by being good; those appear only once a named reviewer actually exists. Automation may assist with organizing, structuring and drafting text, but it cannot be the source of a factual claim and cannot be the final clinical reviewer. Where automation was used in producing a record, that is a matter for disclosure, not something to obscure.

Commercial independence

Sponsors, advertisers, financing partners and referral partners cannot select which treatments are covered, alter the content of a comparison, suppress a limitation or risk, influence the order in which options appear, or purchase a favorable description. Commercial content is visually and structurally distinct from editorial content. Where a relationship exists that a reasonable reader would want to know about, it is disclosed on the page in question, not only in a policy document.

• No paid placement inside a comparison, a treatment guide or a recommendation
• No removal of an accurate limitation, risk or tradeoff at a commercial party's request
• No undisclosed affiliate or referral inventory embedded in editorial links
• Advertising, where present, must not obstruct or precede the answer the reader came for

Originality and the anti-filler rule

Templates exist to guarantee that required fields are present. They are not a license to generate the same paragraph forty times with the treatment name swapped. Each record must contain something specific to its subject that could not be written about an adjacent one: the actual failure modes of that material, the specific component people find missing from that kind of quote, the particular question that separates two options that sound identical. Length achieved by restating the introduction is worse than a short page, because it wastes the reader's time while appearing to be thorough.

Prohibited practices

Some things are not judgment calls. The following do not appear on this site regardless of how well they would perform, and several are enforced by an automatic check on every page instead of by editorial vigilance alone.

• Invented experience, no first-person clinical anecdotes, no fabricated patient stories, no manufactured case studies
• Invented evidence, no made-up statistics, survey results, quotations, credentials, ratings or reviews
• National average prices, estimated prices and clinical outcome percentages, for the reasons set out in the evidence standards
• Manufactured urgency, artificial scarcity, or fear used to move someone toward a treatment or a form
• Certainty language on matters that require an examination, no guarantees, no promises of outcome, no assertion that an option is right for the reader
• Individual medical direction, pages describe what an option involves and what to ask, never what a specific reader should do
• Diagnosis by webpage, symptom content describes categories and warning signs and routes to assessment

How uncertainty is shown instead of hidden

Hedging language scattered through a paragraph makes writing feel cautious while telling the reader nothing. The Guide separates the two: what is well established is stated plainly, and what is uncertain is named, along with what specifically would resolve it: a radiograph, a pocket depth measurement, a plan document, a written itemized quote. A reader should finish a page knowing which of their remaining questions have answers they can look up and which have answers only an appointment can produce.

Linking and third-party material

External links point to the primary source of a claim wherever one exists, in preference to a secondary summary of it. Links are not sold, exchanged or placed as a favor. Third-party material is quoted sparingly and attributed, never reproduced at length, and a link is not an endorsement of everything else the linked organization publishes or sells.

Corrections are part of the editorial process

Corrections are logged, not silently patched, propagated to every dependent record instead of fixed only where they were reported, and prioritized by whether the error could change what someone does about their health. The corrections policy sets out what to send and how a report is handled.