A desk that reads documents, and says which ones

Nobody clinical has read this

There is no doctor behind this site, no dermatologist, no surgeon, and no reviewer of any kind. No page here claims clinical review, and no clinician is named, credited or implied by a byline, because none exists and inventing one would be the single worst thing a page like this could do.

That absence sets the boundary of what is written here. This desk can tell you what a document says. It cannot tell you what you should do, because doing that responsibly requires knowing things about you that a website has no access to and no business guessing at.

What it is built from

Statutes and statutory instruments, read on legislation.gov.uk: the regulations that make cosmetic surgery a regulated activity, the Medical Act provisions on the Specialist Register, and the Privy Council order listing the specialties the UK recognises.

Regulators' own pages: the Care Quality Commission's guidance for people choosing cosmetic surgery, Healthcare Improvement Scotland on registering independent clinics, and the MHRA's Drug Safety Updates.

Medicine licences: Summaries of Product Characteristics on the electronic medicines compendium, which give the indication, the legal category, the licence number and the holder for every licensed product discussed here.

NHS pages, for what the health service funds and what it tells patients to check. The Advertising Standards Authority's published advice, for what a UK advert may claim. And the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's travel advice, for what official help exists when a procedure is bought abroad.

Where a source could not be read, that is said on the page rather than papered over. The General Medical Council's website refused every automated request made to it on 24 September 2026, so the registration facts on this site are quoted from the NHS pages that state them, and the statutory position from the Act itself.

The standing rules

Quotation over summary. A fact on this site comes with the publisher that published it and the date it was read. Where two sources disagree, both are named rather than one being picked.

No invented arithmetic. Spontaneous side-effect report counts are not divided by population estimates to manufacture an incidence, and no percentage, success rate or graft-survival figure appears unless a named source printed it.

No clinics. None named, ranked, scored or linked, anywhere, ever. That is not a placeholder for a future commercial arrangement.

No images of anybody. No before-and-after photographs, no patient pictures, no illustrated head implying an outcome. Every picture here is a diagram of a document.

No doses. No milligrams, no frequencies, no regimens, no comparisons of one strength against another.

What this site is not for

It is not a diagnosis. Several kinds of hair loss are not pattern baldness — thyroid disease, iron deficiency, alopecia areata, scarring alopecias, shedding that follows an illness or a medicine — and telling them apart is a job for a doctor with your history in front of them. A GP appointment costs nothing and is the step this site recommends more often than any other, precisely because it earns nothing.

It is also not a substitute for the registers. Everything here points at documents you can open yourself, and the most useful thing this site can do is make you confident enough to go and read one.

When it is wrong

It will be, somewhere. Licences are revised, guidance is updated, registers change, and a page read in September is a page read in September. Corrections are welcome and are made with the source attached — the route is on the contact page, and how the site is funded, along with everything it has turned down, is on how this site is paid.