Who writes this, and what we are not

Gumline Almanac is a small editorial project about one narrow subject: cleaning the spaces between teeth, and the machines sold for it. It is written by the Gumline Almanac editorial team — writers and researchers, not clinicians.

There is no dentist behind this

No dentist has reviewed any page here. We have not engaged one, and we will not print a reviewer's name, a set of letters or a "medically reviewed" badge to borrow authority we have not earned. That trick is common on health sites and it is worth less than it looks, because a badge tells you nothing about which sentence was checked.

What we do instead is put the limitation at the top of every page that touches a condition or a treatment, in a box you cannot miss, and keep every page inside what published sources actually say. If that makes this a less authoritative site than one with a dental adviser, then it is a less authoritative site, honestly labelled.

How a fact gets onto a page

Every fragile fact on this site — a specification, a percentage, a quotation, a date — is written down in the almanac's working notes with the address it came from and the day it was read, before it is allowed into a sentence. Three rules follow from that, and they are the ones that shape how this place reads.

The first is that what cannot be verified is left out rather than softened. A hedge still reads as a fact to most people, so when we could not open a source, we say we could not open it and print nothing from it. There are several such admissions on this site, including one about laser treatment where the full text was behind a wall we could not get through.

The second is that a vendor's claim is always attributed and never adopted. When a manufacturer says its machine is some multiple more effective than string floss, we say the manufacturer says so, name the study behind it, and quote the funding declaration from that study in the same breath.

The third is that a figure and the drawing beside it must come from the same place. The plates on this site are generated from the same data the tables render, and the build fails if the copy and the figure stop agreeing — so a specification edited in one place cannot quietly contradict a chart somewhere else.

What we will not publish

No before-and-after photographs, no patient stories, no testimonials, and no ratings of anything by us — we have examined nobody and tested nothing. No dosing of any kind. No instruction that amounts to performing a procedure on yourself. No clinic is named or recommended anywhere on this site, for any reason. And no word from the marketing vocabulary of this industry: nothing here is described as painless, permanent, guaranteed or risk-free, because we are not in a position to promise any of those about a human mouth.

How we are paid, and how little that buys

A few links on this site earn a commission. There are three, they go to Amazon, to BURST and to a dental savings plan on one page, and each is marked where it sits. The recommendation at the top of our main commercial page — a manual brush, a fluoride toothpaste, and floss or interdental brushes — earns nothing at all, and it goes first anyway. The full arrangement is written out, including the programme we decided not to take.

Corrections

Specifications move, manufacturers redesign their pages, and reviews are updated. If you find a figure here that no longer matches its source, write to the almanac. We would rather re-read the source and date the correction in public than quietly change a number and pretend it was always right.