Who writes this, and what they are not

Far Chair is written by the Far Chair editorial team: researchers who read primary documents and write up what they say. That is the whole of it.

There is no dentist here

Nobody with a dental qualification has reviewed a word on this site. We have not hired a clinical reviewer, and we are not going to put a name and a set of letters at the top of a page to make it look as though we have.

That matters, so it is said on every page and not buried here. It means no page on this site can tell you what is wrong with your teeth, what treatment you need, or whether a plan somebody has offered you is a good one. Those are clinical judgements and they require someone who has examined your mouth and looked at your x-rays.

What a site without a dentist can still do honestly is read what regulators, health services and public payers publish, report it accurately with dates, and be clear about where the published record runs out. That is the job we have taken on.

What we do before a sentence is published

• Every figure is read at its source. Not from a summary, a round-up, or another site's citation of it. The document, its own effective date and the day we read it are named on the page that uses the figure, in the paragraph that uses it, rather than gathered somewhere you would have to go looking.
• Prices come from public payer schedules, named and dated, with the arithmetic shown where we add lines together, and always with the note that an allowed amount is a ceiling a payer will pay rather than what a practice charges.
• A figure we cannot verify does not get softened into a hedge. It gets left out, and the page says why it is missing. Hedged numbers read as facts to anyone skimming.
• Where a source contradicts itself, we say so. On one page you will find a professional body's own press release and its news item giving different percentages for the same survey question. Both are cited.

What we refuse

No clinic, chain, dentist, agency, facilitator or booking platform is named, ranked, recommended or linked anywhere on this site, and none of them pays us anything. The disclosure page sets out what that decision cost and why it is not reversible without rewriting that page first.

We also publish no before-and-after images, no patient stories and no testimonials. Photographs of a stranger's mouth cannot tell you anything about your own, and in this particular market they are the primary sales tool.

What we would change our mind about

If a health service, a regulator or a peer-reviewed study published an actual outcome rate for dental treatment abroad, it would go straight onto the Mexico versus Turkey page, with its date, whichever direction it pointed. We looked for one and there is not one.

Getting in touch

Corrections are the most useful thing you can send us, especially with a link to the document. The contact page explains what we can and cannot answer — and a treatment question, unfortunately, is firmly in the second category.