How we vet

Five steps, in this order. Fail any one and there is no seat. We re-run step one every twelve months for everybody already on the roster.

01 · The licence

Verified directly with the state dental board. Active, unrestricted, no open disciplinary action. Re-checked annually — a lapsed licence takes the newsroom out of the index and off the homepage the same week, automatically.

02 · Chair time

A recorded walkthrough of the operatory and one real workflow, start to finish. We are looking at sterilisation, at how the team speaks to each other when they think nobody is grading them, and at whether the equipment in the marketing photographs is actually in the building.

03 · Four references

Three patients who went through something hard — a root canal, an extraction, a bill that hurt — and one peer who has seen the work. We call all four. We ask the patients what went wrong, not what went right.

04 · Sixty minutes with an editor

Explain a deep filling to a frightened adult. Explain it again to a nine-year-old. This is where most applications end, and not because the applicants are bad clinicians. Plenty of excellent dentists can only sell it, and selling is not writing.

05 · The standards agreement

Signed and public. Claims get a source or they get cut, financial relationships are disclosed in the first paragraph, corrections stay visible forever, and the byline belongs to someone who did the work.

What vetting is not

It is not a clinical audit and it is not a guarantee of outcome. We are not in a position to grade anyone’s margins from a video call, and we do not pretend otherwise. What vetting establishes is that this person is licensed, that the practice is what it claims to be, that patients who went through something difficult would send a friend, and that the writing is theirs.

Everything after that is your judgment, which is the point of publishing the writing in the first place.