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Clinical review
Every page that touches diagnosis, treatment or self-care is read by a licensed clinician before it goes live.
Editorial and clinical review policy
How GlaadBlog.org decides what is true enough to publish
Dental content is unusually easy to get wrong and unusually expensive to get wrong, because readers act on it in their own mouths. This page sets out who writes our guides, which clinician reads them before publication, what we will and will not treat as evidence, and what happens when we make a mistake. It is written to be checked, not admired.
Updated September 15, 2026 Four licensed reviewers
The commitments
Four standards we can be held to
An editorial policy is worth little if nothing in it can be measured. These four are deliberately specific, so a reader can tell whether we kept them.
12 months
Re-review interval
Six months for fast-moving topics such as aligner systems and whitening regulation. Sooner if guidance changes.
3 working days
Correction response
The time we aim to take to reply to a flagged error, whether or not we end up changing the page.
None
Paid placement
No brand, clinic or manufacturer can buy a recommendation, a ranking position or a mention in a guide.
Authorship
Who writes for GlaadBlog.org
Two kinds of people produce the text on this site, and every article says which one wrote it. There is no house byline and no unattributed content.
Nina Reyes, RDH, BSc
Senior writer and hygienist
Registered dental hygienist who has spent a decade explaining oral care to patients at the chairside. She writes most of our prevention and daily-routine guides.
A registered hygienist drafting prevention content is not a formality. It is the difference between a page that lists the ideal routine and a page that knows which part of the routine patients actually abandon in week three.
Dental writers
Commissioned, briefed, never anonymous
Our other guides are written by health journalists who specialise in dentistry and who are briefed to read the primary evidence rather than summarise other websites. Writers are paid for the work, never per click and never by any company mentioned in the piece.
Writers do not have publishing access. A draft cannot reach the live site without an editor and a clinical reviewer both signing it off, which is the entire point of the process in the next section.
We do not publish AI-generated articles as finished work. Where a tool assists with research or first-pass structure, a named human writer remains responsible for every sentence, and clinical review happens exactly as it would otherwise.
Clinical review board
Who checks the work before you read it
Reviewers are matched to the subject, not assigned in rotation. A periodontist reads the gum pages, an orthodontist reads anything comparing appliances, an endodontist reads anything about nerve pain. Full biographies sit on the about page.
Dr. Marcus Hale
DDS
Restorative and implant dentistry
Dr. Adaeze Okafor
BDS, MSc Periodontology
Gum disease and soft-tissue health
Dr. Erik Brandt
DMD
Orthodontics and aligner therapy
Dr. Tomas Silva
DDS, MS
Root canals and dental pain
Reviewers are paid a flat fee for their time. They are not paid by the page, not paid more for a favourable review, and hold no stake in the site. Where a reviewer has a commercial relationship with a product or technique under discussion, they recuse themselves and the page goes to someone else.
The process
How a page becomes a published guide on GlaadBlog.org
Eight steps, in this order, for every clinical page on the site. No step is skipped for a short article, and no page publishes on a deadline it has not earned.
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Brief and scope
An editor writes the brief before anyone writes a word: the question a reader is actually asking, the decision they face, and the specific claims the page will have to support. Briefs that cannot be supported by existing evidence get cut at this stage rather than padded out later.
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Research against the source hierarchy
The writer works down the hierarchy set out below, starting with systematic reviews and national clinical guidance. Every number, time range and cost band is recorded with its source in a working sheet that stays attached to the draft.
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Draft
Drafting is done by a dental writer or by our staff hygienist. Drafts are written in plain language, because a guide a worried patient cannot parse at 11pm has failed regardless of how accurate it is.
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Line edit and claim audit
An editor reads for structure and clarity, then separately audits every sentence that makes a factual claim. Hedging is added where the evidence is thin and removed where it was only there to sound cautious.
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Clinical review
A board member with the relevant specialty reads the full draft, not a summary. They check clinical accuracy, flag anything that overstates what a treatment can achieve, and confirm the safety guidance tells readers when to stop reading and book an appointment.
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Revision and sign-off
The writer answers every review comment in writing. Anything the reviewer and the editorial team cannot agree on is resolved by removing the claim, not by softening it. The reviewer signs off on the final text, never on an earlier version.
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Pre-publication checks
We re-open every outbound citation to confirm it still says what we claim it says, check that images are clinically representative, and confirm the byline, reviewer credit and review date are correct on the page itself.
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Publication and scheduled re-review
The page publishes with a visible updated date and goes straight onto the re-review calendar. Nothing on GlaadBlog.org is published and then forgotten.
Evidence
Our sourcing hierarchy, strongest to unusable
Not all citations are worth the same. One small trial and a synthesis of thirty trials are not interchangeable, even though both look identical in a footnote. We rank sources before we use them, and the rank decides how strongly the page is allowed to speak.
| Rank | Source type | How we are allowed to use it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Systematic reviews and meta-analyses | Our default basis for any claim about whether a treatment works. If a Cochrane review or comparable synthesis exists on the question, it leads. |
| 2 | Clinical guidance from national bodies | Used for recommendations, recall intervals, safe concentration limits and public-health framing. ADA, NIDCR, CDC, NHS and WHO material sits here. |
| 3 | Regulatory and product-safety documents | What a product is actually cleared or approved to do, and at what strength. Used to test marketing claims, never to support them. |
| 4 | Individual clinical trials | Used to add nuance, describe a mechanism or note an emerging finding. A single trial is never the only support for a headline claim. |
| 5 | Narrative reviews, textbooks, expert opinion | Background, anatomy and mechanism. Labelled in the text as professional consensus rather than trial evidence. |
| 6 | Manufacturer material, press releases, single-clinic case reports | Not cited as evidence at all. We may quote a manufacturer on what their own product contains, and nothing beyond that. |
In practice that means we lean on the Cochrane Library for questions of whether an intervention works, and on bodies such as the American Dental Association, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and CDC Oral Health for guidance, prevalence and safety framing. Those links open in a new tab and earn us nothing.
We link out generously and on purpose. If a reader wants to check us, the source should be one click away rather than buried in a bibliography nobody opens. You can see the hierarchy applied in our guides to gum disease and teeth whitening, or browse the full guide library.
How we handle uncertainty and disagreement
A large share of dentistry is genuinely unsettled. The optimal check-up interval for a low-risk adult, the long-term value of some whitening protocols, the size of the benefit that flossing shows in trials rather than in clinics: these are contested, and the honest answer is that the evidence is weaker than the confidence with which it is usually stated online.
Three rules apply when we hit that kind of question.
- Name the uncertainty in the text. If trials disagree or the evidence base is small, the page says so in the same paragraph as the claim, not in a footnote at the bottom.
- Separate mechanism from outcome. That a product does something measurable in a laboratory is not evidence that it changes anything a patient would notice. Those are written as two different statements.
- Prefer removal to hedging. When an editor and a reviewer cannot agree how strongly a claim can be made, the claim comes out. A shorter accurate page beats a longer equivocal one.
Where reviewers disagree with each other, which happens most often over treatment sequencing and cost expectations, we describe the range of clinical opinion instead of picking a winner and presenting it as settled.
What we will not publish
No diagnosis, no personalised treatment plan, no claim that a home remedy replaces professional care, and no before-and-after testimonials. Our medical disclaimer spells out the boundary in full: this site is health journalism, not clinical advice, and it cannot see your mouth.
Accountability
Corrections, updates and the date on every page
Our correction policy
We will get things wrong. The policy is about what happens next, and it has three tiers.
- Typographical fixes - spelling, broken links, formatting. Fixed silently, with no note.
- Clarifications - the facts were right but the wording could mislead. Rewritten, with a dated note at the foot of the page.
- Corrections - a factual or clinical error. The error is fixed, a dated correction notice stays permanently at the foot of the page describing what was wrong, and the page goes back to a clinical reviewer before it is live again.
We do not quietly delete pages that turn out to be wrong. Where guidance has moved on, the page is rewritten and the change is dated.
Why every page carries an updated date
Dental guidance shifts slowly, but it does shift, and an undated health page is a page you cannot judge. Every guide shows the month it was last reviewed and the clinician who reviewed it.
- Every 12 months - the standing re-review cycle for all clinical guides.
- Every 6 months - for fast-moving areas such as aligner systems, whitening regulation and at-home device claims.
- Immediately - when a national body issues new guidance, a product is recalled, or a reader flags something that holds up.
A re-review is a real read, not a date change. If nothing needed to change, the date still moves, because checked-and-still-correct is useful information for a reader deciding whether to trust the page.
Found an error? Tell us.
Send the page address, the sentence you are questioning and, if you have one, the source you think is better. Reader corrections are read by an editor rather than a bot, and we reply whether or not we end up agreeing. General questions can go through the contact page instead.
Independence, funding and conflicts of interest
GlaadBlog.org is independently owned and has been publishing since 2019. It is funded by advertising and by affiliate commission on some consumer products. That creates an obvious pressure, so here is precisely where the line sits.
- No company can pay to be recommended, to rank higher, to be included in a comparison, or to have a competitor removed from one.
- Advertising is sold against the site as a whole, not against individual recommendations. Advertisers see no article before publication and have no input into one afterwards.
- Where a link earns us a commission, the page discloses it. Commission never changes the ordering of a recommendation, and products we think are a poor buy are described that way regardless.
- No manufacturer, clinic chain or dental group funds our content, and we do not accept sponsored articles, paid guest posts or paid links.
- Writers and reviewers declare relevant commercial relationships. A declared conflict means reassignment, not a disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
More about who we are and why the site exists is on the about page. How we handle reader data is covered in the privacy policy, and the conditions of use of this site are set out in the terms of use.
This policy was last reviewed on September 15, 2026. Substantive changes to it are dated here, the same way corrections are dated on our guides.