Editorial and medical review standards

This page describes how the guides on this site are researched, sourced, reviewed and corrected. It exists so you can judge the information here on its method rather than on our say-so, and so that the limits of what we can tell you are stated in one place instead of scattered through the footnotes.

What we count as a source

Clinical statements are sourced in roughly this order of preference. Where only a weaker class of evidence exists, we say so on the page rather than presenting it as settled.

1. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses — pooled data across studies. Most survival and complication figures on this site come from these.
2. Consensus statements from professional bodies — for example the ITI consensus report on zygomatic implants.
3. Clinical guidelines and official policy — NHS England policy, published NHS trust criteria, General Dental Council guidance, Civil Aviation Authority guidance, Competition and Markets Authority material.
4. Prospective clinical studies and long-term cohorts — used where no pooled analysis exists, and labelled as single studies rather than as consensus.
5. Retrospective studies and case series — used sparingly, and only where the alternative is no evidence at all.
6. Manufacturer documentation — acceptable for product facts such as fixture lengths, and for nothing else.

What we do not treat as a source: clinic marketing pages, dental tourism agency sites, press releases, and figures circulating online with no traceable origin. This matters more than it sounds. For UK private treatment prices, for example, no independent published fee survey exists — every figure available is a clinic advertising its own prices. We say that on the cost pages instead of quoting those figures as though they were research.

What “medically reviewed” means here

Our reviewing clinician is Uzm. Dt. Oğuzhan Sunar, a Specialist Periodontist with advanced training in zygomatic implant surgery. He is the named clinician responsible for checking the clinical accuracy of what appears here.

Review happens statement by statement rather than page by page. Each clinical claim on a guide is tracked individually and is either confirmed by him or still waiting. That is a slower process than signing off a whole page at once, and we chose it deliberately: a page-level tick tells you nothing about which sentence was actually checked.

The confirmation badge

Every guide carries a badge beside its byline reading something like “3 of 18 statements clinically confirmed so far”. That is a live count from our review records, not a design element.

If the number is low, the page has not yet been through clinical sign-off. We publish in that state rather than holding the guides back, because the alternative — an empty site — helps nobody, but we are not willing to imply a check that has not happened. This is also why our structured data behaves the same way: a page only declares a medical reviewer to search engines once at least one statement on it has genuinely been confirmed, and only declares a review date once every statement has.

Figures we cannot verify

Some things cannot be sourced honestly, and we mark those rather than filling the gap. In the reference list at the foot of each guide you will see items tagged verification required. Those are not oversights. They are places where one of the following is true:

• The figure is a clinic’s own commercial information — prices, package contents, protocol timings, guarantee terms — and has not yet been confirmed in writing.
• No primary source exists that we could find. Turkish health tourism patient volumes are an example: the figures circulating online come from commercial secondary sources that disagree with one another, and the responsible state agency does not publish patient-volume statistics on its public pages. So we make no volume claim.
• A source exists but does not actually support the specific claim. We separate “we could not find a source” from “the source we found does not say this”, because they are different problems.

How these pages are written

We would rather state this plainly than let you assume otherwise: drafting on this site is AI-assisted and human-directed. Structure, wording and first drafts are produced with AI tools; every editorial decision, every source and every claim is checked by a person before it is published.

Specifically: citations are not generated. Each reference on this site was retrieved from the publisher or from PubMed/PMC and checked against the claim it supports — which is how we caught several instances where a widely repeated figure did not match what the paper actually reported. Clinical statements go into the review queue described above rather than being published as verified. We do not use AI to invent statistics, sources, patient stories or reviews, and we do not publish generated images of patients.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we would like to know. Please tell us through the contact page, quoting the page and the sentence.

Substantive corrections — anything that changes the meaning of a clinical or financial statement — are made to the page and the guide’s update date is changed to reflect it. Typographical fixes do not change the update date, because signalling a content refresh that did not happen is its own small dishonesty. Where a correction changes something a reader may have acted on, we say what changed on the page itself rather than editing silently.

Conflicts of interest

This site is funded by enquiries being passed to a clinical team, and our reviewing clinician also practises at that clinic. Both facts are set out on our about page, and neither is incidental — you should weigh this guide accordingly.

What follows from that, and what we hold ourselves to:

• We do not receive a commission or referral fee based on any treatment you go on to have.
• We do not name, rank or recommend clinics, and we do not publish “best clinic” lists — including ones that would favour us. Our guide to choosing a surgeon teaches you to check a clinician instead.
• We do not publish patient reviews or testimonials we cannot verify, and we do not incentivise reviews.
• Patient photographs are published only with documented written consent, and are labelled as individual cases rather than as typical results.
• Pages that could increase our enquiries — costs, treatment abroad — carry the same caveats as pages that could reduce them. The guides on complications, contraindications and what happens when treatment fails exist for that reason.

Keeping pages current

Each guide shows when it was last substantively updated, and that date is set from the page’s own revision record rather than typed in by hand. The site-wide date in the header is derived the same way, from the most recently revised guide.

Where the evidence base itself is thin or moving — pterygoid implant outcomes and long-term zygomatic follow-up beyond twelve years are both examples — we say so on the page rather than presenting an unsettled question as resolved.

What this site is not

It is not a substitute for a clinical consultation, and it cannot assess you. Nothing here can tell you whether a treatment suits your anatomy; only a clinician reviewing your CT scan can. Please also read our medical disclaimer.