Who writes this, and what we are not

No dentist reviews this site

Cap & Span is written by the Cap & Span editorial team. It is not written by a dentist, not reviewed by a dentist, and not produced with one. We have not invented an advisory board, we do not put letters after anyone's name, and there is no reviewer in this site's structured data because there is no reviewer. If you ever read "medically reviewed" or "dentist-approved" on a page here, something has gone badly wrong and we would like to hear about it.

What we can do is read documents carefully, quote them exactly, date them, and show our arithmetic. What we cannot do is look at your tooth. Naming a problem and choosing a treatment for it both require a licensed clinician and an examination, and no page here is an attempt to do either job from a distance.

The method, in full

We looked for a free, public, primary source giving a United States retail price for restorative dentistry and did not find one. Rather than soften that into a range, we went to the documents that do publish real numbers: payer fee schedules. Three are read in full — a Pennsylvania Medicaid schedule effective 1 August 2026, a Montana Medicaid dental schedule dated 1 January 2026, and a Washington State Department of Health programme's allowances for 2026–27. Each is named on every page that uses it, with a link and the date we read it.

Two machine checks keep that honest rather than decorative. Every currency figure on the site is listed in a file naming the document it came from, and a script fails if any figure on a page is missing from it — that check exists because a fee invented in an early draft read exactly like the real ones. Separately, every drawing asserts at build time that the page it sits on still states each number it shows, so a price edited in the prose and forgotten in the chart stops the build instead of shipping a contradiction.

Things we will not publish

• The name of any dental practice, chain, group or clinic — recommended, ranked, compared or linked. Not one appears anywhere on this site.
• Before-and-after photographs, patient stories, testimonials, ratings or success rates. We sourced none we could stand behind, and an unsourced one is indistinguishable from a made-up one.
• A lifespan for any restoration. The figures circulate widely and we found no source for them we would print. Payer replacement intervals appear instead, labelled as funding rules.
• Instructions for doing anything to your own teeth. Not re-cementing a crown, not filling a cavity, not removing anything. Those pages exist elsewhere and we think they are a bad idea.
• The words painless, permanent, guaranteed or lifetime as claims about a restoration. Where a reader's own search term contains one — "is a dental bridge permanent" — we explain what it does and does not mean and leave it in quotation marks.

Corrections

Fee schedules are reissued, and ours will go out of date. The most useful message anyone can send this desk is a link to a newer version of a document we quote, or evidence that a figure here is wrong. We will change it, and say on the page that we changed it. Write to us through the contact page.