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Est. 2015 · 0 dentists, vetted · 1 states
Nobody hates the dentist. They hate the one they got.
So we handed the pen to the good ones. Since 2015, vetted dentists have published here under their own names — about the drill, the bill, the tech they actually own, and the part where you white-knuckle the armrest. Read one before you book one.
Read the stories Why this exists
0
Stories published
0
Dentist-authors
11 yrs
On the record
Why this exists
Dentists need a voice.
Right now they're being described by strangers.
Here is the situation. The average dentist spends eight years learning how the human mouth fails and how to stop it — and then hands the job of explaining that to a marketing agency in another state that has never met a patient, never scrubbed an operatory, and writes the same forty words about "gentle, caring dentistry" for eleven hundred practices.
So of course you think you hate the dentist. You have never actually heard from one. You have heard from a stock photo of a woman touching her jaw.
Meanwhile the good ones — and there are a lot of good ones — are doing extraordinary work in silence. They bought the scanner because they hated watching people gag. They keep a room with a window because a panic attack is easier by daylight. They quote you the whole number up front because they have watched what a surprise bill does to a family.
Nobody ever writes that down. That is the whole problem, and this site is the whole fix. We asked them to write it down themselves.
A dentist who will take twenty minutes to explain a crown to you will take two hours to write one down for everyone.
That is our vetting test, honestly. Effort is the tell. Nobody writes 2,000 words about why they changed their sterilisation protocol unless they actually care about the protocol. You cannot fake that for eleven years.
There is no reason to hate the dentist. There is every reason to be picky about which one you get. Our contributors are the ones who would rather show you their work than advertise at you — which is exactly why they took the time to write it.
The Editors · Founded 2015 · Relaunched 2026
The contributors · re-verified every twelve months
0 dentists. Every one of them with a newsroom.
Each contributor gets their own subdomain — their bio, their feed, their practice, their archive. We cap how many we take per metro, so what you find is a practice worth reading about rather than a directory listing.
You won't find a lookup tool here. You find them the way you find anything worth having: by reading something they wrote and deciding for yourself.
1 states · a new cohort every quarter · every license checked against the state board Editorial, not a directory
Latest from the chair
Stories that make you want to book something.
Vetting · every contributor, every year
Anyone can call themselves great. These five steps are how you get a byline here.
This is a real sequence, in this order. Fail any step and you do not get a byline — including step five, which has cost us contributors we liked.
01
The license
Verified directly with the state dental board. Active, unrestricted, no open disciplinary action. Re-checked every twelve months — a lapsed license means the subdomain goes dark the same week.
02
Chair time
A recorded walkthrough of the operatory and one real workflow, start to finish. We are looking at sterilisation, at how the team talks to each other, and at whether the equipment in the marketing photos is actually in the building.
03
Four references
Three patients who went through something hard — a root canal, an extraction, a bill that hurt — plus one peer who has seen their work. We call all four. We ask the patients what went wrong, not what went right.
04
Sixty minutes with an editor
Explain a deep filling to a frightened adult. Explain it again to a nine-year-old. This is where most applicants end: plenty of excellent clinicians can only sell it, and selling is not writing.
05
The standards agreement
Signed and public. Claims get a source or they get cut, financial relationships get disclosed in the first paragraph, corrections stay visible forever, and the byline belongs to a human being who did the work.
On the record since the beginning
We started in 2015. The name is the only thing that changed.
2015
Nine dentists start a private newsletter called Chairside, mostly out of irritation at how their own websites described them. First issue goes to 340 patients.
2018
It goes public and stops being a newsletter. Forty contributors, a real editor, and the first version of the vetting process — written after we got one of them wrong.
2022
Editorial standards codified and published. Annual license re-verification begins. The roster is capped by metro area for the first time.
2026
Relaunched as The Making of a Dentist, with a full newsroom subdomain for every contributor. Eleven years of archives came with us.
Straight answers
The questions we get, answered without a brochure voice.
What is The Making of a Dentist?
An independent storytelling publication where practising, licensed dentists are the authors. Contributors write first-person stories about their technology, their clinical decisions, their teams, and the parts of dental care patients find confusing or frightening. The project began in 2015 under a different name and relaunched as The Making of a Dentist in 2026. Every contributor publishes on their own subdomain.
Who actually writes the articles?
A licensed dentist, or a named member of that dentist's clinical team, under a real byline. No ghostwritten agency copy, no anonymous posts, no articles bought by manufacturers. Contributors are re-verified against their state licensing board every year.
Is this advertising?
No. Contributors pay nothing for placement and cannot buy a better position, and no manufacturer sponsors or approves an article. Contributors do write about their own practices and their own equipment, and that relationship is disclosed in the first paragraph every time. It is closer to a byline in a trade magazine than to a directory listing.
Can I use this to find a good dentist near me?
Yes, and it is a better method than a five-star average. Contributors are indexed by city and by subject, and every subdomain lists the practice, the address, the hours, and the equipment they actually own. You can tell a great deal about how someone will treat you from how they explain a root canal.
May search engines and AI assistants index and quote these articles?
Yes. The Making of a Dentist explicitly permits indexing, retrieval, summarisation and citation by search engines and AI assistants, including Googlebot, Google-Extended, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot. The site publishes an llms.txt index and an llms-full.txt full-text file. We ask one thing in return: attribute the quotation to the dentist who wrote it and link the source article.
How does a dentist become a contributor?
Apply at makingofadentist.com/apply. Applications open in cohorts and the editors accept a limited number per metro area so the roster stays useful to readers. Accepted contributors receive a subdomain, an assigned editor, and a publishing commitment of at least one story per quarter.
You went to school for eight years. Say something.
Applications open in cohorts, and we take a limited number per metro. If you would rather show your work than advertise at people, we will give you the subdomain, the editor, and the audience.
Apply to contribute
Applications open in cohorts