How we source, verify, and attribute

Data Sources

Pacific Shores is built on publicly available, authoritative data. The directory of treatment centers is sourced from the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator, the federal database that every state-licensed substance-use or mental-health provider in the United States is required to be registered with. We refresh that dataset quarterly. When a facility is removed from the federal registry — because a license was revoked, the center closed, or a state regulator suspended operations — we remove it from our directory within 30 days.

Editorial content draws on a narrow set of primary sources, and we prefer primary over secondary wherever possible. For clinical claims, we cite SAMHSA Treatment Improvement Protocols (TIPs), NIDA Research Reports, CDC surveillance data, ASAM Criteria (the industry-standard framework for matching patients to levels of care), and the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5-TR. For insurance-coverage explanations, we work from CMS Parity compliance filings, state insurance-department rulings, and publicly posted Summary Plan Descriptions. For cost figures, we use the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), HCUP inpatient data, and published NIH-AARP analyses rather than marketing figures from treatment centers.

Every editorial guide on this site carries a Sources section at the foot of the article linking to the specific citations referenced in the text. We do this so that a reader who wants to verify a claim — or a clinician who wants to check whether we represented their field accurately — can do so without reverse-engineering our reasoning.

Our Review Process

1. Drafting. Guides are written by our editorial team. We do not publish AI-generated drafts without substantive human editing, fact-checking, and source attribution, and we do not republish content from other sites without explicit permission and clear citation.
2. Source-check. Every factual claim — clinical, statistical, financial, regulatory — is cross-referenced against a primary source. If we cannot locate a primary source for a claim, either we soften the claim ("many programs report…" rather than "67% of programs…") or we omit it.
3. Clinical-guideline alignment. When describing treatment approaches, we align our language with ASAM Criteria for levels of care, SAMHSA TIPs for specific interventions, and the APA DSM-5-TR for diagnostic terminology. Where professional bodies disagree, we present the disagreement rather than pretending there is consensus.
4. Transparent attribution. We publish as Pacific Shores as an institution. We do not invent expert personas, and we do not attach fictional M.D. or LCSW credentials to articles to inflate authority. When a named clinician does review or contribute to a piece, their real credentials and a verifiable bio appear alongside the byline.
5. Periodic refresh. Guides covering regulatory or insurance topics are reviewed at least annually, and more frequently when major policy changes occur (for example, the 2024 parity-enforcement rules prompted a site-wide review of our coverage content in early 2026). Every guide displays its last-updated date.

What We Don't Do

• No pay-to-play rankings. Treatment centers cannot pay for higher placement, a "verified" badge, or editorial coverage. Our directory lists every qualifying SAMHSA-registered facility, ranked by state and geographic proximity, not by who pays us. We do run affiliate relationships with specific admissions networks — disclosed below — but those relationships affect helpline routing, not directory rank.
• No sponsored editorial. We do not accept payment to publish articles or include brand mentions. If we review or recommend a specific approach, we do so on our own judgment informed by the evidence. If a treatment center or vendor has financially supported any portion of an article, we will label it clearly as sponsored and it will not appear as editorial.
• No guaranteed outcomes. Addiction is a chronic, relapsing condition. No treatment — including the most evidence-based, best-resourced programs — eliminates relapse risk. We do not publish language suggesting otherwise, and we flag any third-party quote that claims a specific success rate unless that rate is sourced from a peer-reviewed outcome study.
• No medical advice. Our content is informational. Decisions about level of care, medication, or specific programs are clinical decisions that require a qualified evaluator with access to your history. We try to give readers enough information to have a more productive conversation with that evaluator — not to substitute for one.
• No ghost-reviewers in structured data. We do not add reviewedBy or author schema.org markup to pages claiming clinical review by individuals who did not actually review the content. Structured data on our site reflects only what happened editorially.

Corrections Policy

We correct factual errors within five business days of verification. Material corrections — changes that affect the substantive meaning of a sentence, rather than a typo or formatting fix — are logged with a visible correction notice at the foot of the article, stating what changed and when. Non-material edits (typos, link fixes, formatting) are made silently.

If you believe we have published an error, email [email protected] with a link to the page and, if possible, the source that contradicts our claim. We read every correction request, acknowledge it within two business days, and publish corrections or explain our reasoning for not changing the text.

Advertising & Affiliate Disclosure

Pacific Shores is a free resource. We fund editorial and engineering work through affiliate relationships with licensed treatment-center networks. When a reader calls our helpline, depending on the plan and geography, they may be connected to a partner network that pays us a referral fee. We do not receive payment for anyone who navigates our directory to a specific center directly — only for calls routed through the helpline.

Two rules about these relationships: (1) They do not affect which centers appear in our directory or in what order. The directory is algorithmically generated from SAMHSA data and geographic proximity. (2) They do not affect editorial content. Our insurance-coverage guides, level-of-care explanations, and program comparisons are written by the editorial team with no input from helpline partners.

Where a specific article recommends a particular category of service in a way that might benefit a helpline partner, we disclose the relationship inside the article rather than at the bottom of the site.

Contact

For editorial inquiries, listing corrections, or questions about the sourcing behind a specific claim, see our contact page or email [email protected].