Who writes this, and how the figures get here

Pocket Molar is written by the Pocket Molar editorial team. Nobody here is a dentist, a dental nurse, a hygienist or a financial adviser, and the site never suggests otherwise. There is no clinician on the masthead, no reviewer credited in the page code, and no letters after anybody's name.

That is a real limitation and it shapes what the site will write about. It will read a published fee schedule and tell you what is on it. It will read a lender's own terms and explain the mechanism. It will not tell you what treatment you need, whether a tooth can be saved, or what a symptom means. Those questions belong to somebody who has looked in your mouth.

Where the numbers come from

Three documents, all published, all read on 24 September 2026. South Dakota's adult dental fee schedule for the state fiscal year beginning 1 July 2026. Wyoming Medicaid's 2026 dental rates. And the official New York workers' compensation dental fee schedule, second edition, effective 13 November 2025.

Two are programme allowances and the third is a ceiling on charging, which is why the site keeps saying they are not retail prices. They are used because they are the only free, public, primary documents that price the same coded procedures, and because a reader can open all three and check the row.

For anything to do with borrowing, the sources are the lender's own published terms and the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's report on medical credit cards. Every one of them is listed with its date in the site's facts file, and every page that carries a figure names the document it came from.

The rules this desk works to

• A number gets printed only if it was read off a named document on a named day. If it cannot be read, it is left out rather than hedged.
• No practice, chain, group or clinic is named, ranked, recommended or linked. Not one, anywhere on the site.
• The routes that pay nothing go first on any page where they are the honest answer, and are marked as paying nothing.
• A discount plan is called a discount plan and labelled not insurance, in those words, next to every link to one.
• No before-and-after pictures, no patient stories, no ratings and no statistics without a named, dated source.
• Nothing on the site is a diagnosis or a treatment plan, and every page that touches treatment says so above the fold.

What the site earns from

Three discount-plan sellers, and nothing else. No lender, no pay-later product, no appointment booking, no practice. That is a narrow list and it costs the site money, which is the point — the reasons are set out on the disclosure page, including what was turned down and why.

Corrections

Fee schedules are revised, sometimes quietly. If a figure here no longer matches the document it names, that is a defect and the desk wants to know: send it over with the line and the schedule and it gets fixed, with the read date moved to the day the new document was checked.