Who writes this, and what we will not write

Who we are

Socket Sense is written and maintained by its editorial team. None of us is a dentist, a dental nurse, a hygienist or a surgeon, and none of us has ever looked inside a reader's mouth. What we do is read published documents carefully, quote them exactly, do the arithmetic in public and refuse to fill gaps with plausible-sounding prose.

No dentist reviews this site. That is a real weakness on a health topic and we are not going to disguise it. You will never see "medically reviewed" on a page here, you will never see initials after a name, and no page's structured data claims a reviewer, because there is not one.

The rule that shapes every page

If we cannot name the document and the date, the sentence does not ship. That rule is why several obvious pages do not exist on this site and why several obvious numbers are missing from the ones that do. A hedge — "typically", "around", "most people find" — still reads as a fact to somebody frightened at one in the morning, so we cut rather than hedge.

Everything fragile is listed, with its source and its read date, in the facts file that ships with this site. The documents behind the money pages are three published payer fee schedules and one payer rule book; the documents behind the healing pages are the NHS and the American Dental Association. Those are the four and the two.

What we will not publish

• Any amount of any medicine. Not a strength, not a count, not a frequency, not a salt rinse recipe. The published sources name categories of painkiller and stop there, and so do we — your pharmacist and your surgery know what else you take.
• Photographs of anybody's mouth, healing or otherwise. Every drawing on this site is original, unbranded and deliberately diagrammatic, because a photograph of a stranger's socket invites a comparison that cannot be made honestly.
• The name of any clinic, practice, chain, group practice or oral-surgery group, anywhere, ranked or linked or recommended. Not one appears on this site.
• Anything about removing a tooth yourself. The ADA's own page on do-it-yourself dentistry notes that dental exams include diagnostic X-rays which cannot be done at home; that is the polite version of the reason.
• A retail United States price for an extraction, because no free public primary source publishes one and we looked.

Freshness, and the one message we most want

Every document behind this site was read on 24 September 2026. Fee schedules are reissued on their own timetables — the Illinois sheet carries 1 July 2026, Louisiana 1 January 2026, Arkansas a run date of 16 September 2026, and the Vermont supplement June 2026. When any of them is replaced, our figures are out of date until we notice.

So the single most useful thing anybody can send us is a link to a newer version of one of those documents. The contact page exists mostly for that.

How the site earns anything

Two paid links, both about paying for treatment, both labelled in the paragraph directly above them. Four other ways to be paid were available and were turned down, including the one that would have earned the most. The disclosure page names all six and gives the reasoning for each refusal, because a refusal that is not written down anywhere is just a mood.