The most searched question in this field is a version of who is best. It is a completely reasonable question. It is also, for anyone publishing at a distance, an unanswerable one, and the entire market of answers to it is constructed on that fact rather than despite it.
This page explains why this publication refuses the format, what we publish in its place, and what we will not list at any price. It is the central editorial rule here, so it is set out at length rather than buried in a policy page.
What a ranking actually claims
When a publication says these are the ten best clinics for a procedure, the implicit claim is enormous. It claims knowledge of clinical outcomes across those clinics and their competitors. It claims knowledge of complication rates and, more importantly, of how complications were managed. It claims knowledge of consent practice, of whether the prescriber assessed patients in person, of aftercare, of the ratio of experienced to newly trained injectors, and of what happens when a patient is unhappy.
None of that is publicly available. It is not in reviews, which are self selected and written before most complications appear. It is not in a directory submission, which is written by the business. It is not visible from a website. It is barely visible from a single visit.
How these lists are usually built
Some are advertising with editorial styling: inclusion is paid for, and the payment is disclosed faintly or not at all. Some are assembled from review aggregates, which measures satisfaction among people who chose to write, at a point in time that precedes most problems. Some are assembled from search visibility, which measures marketing budget. Some are assembled from nothing at all, by writing plausible copy around businesses found in a search.
All four produce a list. None produces an assessment. The reader cannot tell them apart, which is the commercial attraction of the format.
We will not publish a best clinics list, at any price
Not as sponsored content, not as a paid directory ranking, not as a top ten with a disclosure line at the bottom, and not with a scoring system invented to make a commercial arrangement look like a methodology. We have not assessed these businesses. Publishing a ranking would tell you we had.
This costs us the highest earning page type in the sector. We consider that the price of the publication being worth reading, and we would rather state the trade than pretend it does not exist. Our actual revenue model is set out in full on the clinic listings page and on the about page.
What we publish instead
The assessment that is genuinely available is not comparative and not national. It is the assessment of one practitioner, by one patient, before one procedure. It is smaller than a ranking and considerably more useful, because it is about the person who would actually be holding the needle.
So we publish the method for making it. How to find someone on a public register. What a consultation has to cover. Which questions a poorly run business cannot answer. What the law requires and, more often, what it does not. What happens when something goes wrong and who is liable. Every article carries a checkpoint block you can take with you and a rights panel stating what you are entitled to at that stage.
What you are entitled to as a reader
- To know whether the publication you are reading was paid for the placement in front of you.
- To a clear statement of how any comparison or ranking was assembled.
- To advertising that is obviously identifiable as advertising, under the CAP Code.
- To editorial that names its sources and links to the primary ones.
- To be told plainly when a publication does not know something, including this one.
Clinic Insider is published by Northbank Media. Our funding model is stated on the about page in full.
The paid listing tier, and its hard limits
This publication does sell a clinic listing. It is important to explain how that is not a ranking in disguise.
A listing contains only disclosed facts that a reader can independently verify: the registered name and registration number of the practitioners, the regulator registration of the premises where one is required, the prescriber arrangement, the written complications and correction policy, and the indemnity arrangement. Listings are ordered alphabetically and never by any other criterion. They are labelled as paid on the page. They carry no score, no star, no badge, no tier above tier, and no editorial commentary.
They are, deliberately, boring. A listing is a disclosure form, not a recommendation, and the value to the reader is that the facts in it are the same facts our articles tell you to ask for. The value to a clinic is that disclosing them is easy if you have them and impossible if you do not.
The obvious objection
The objection is that readers want a shortlist, and that refusing to provide one simply sends them to a publication with fewer scruples. That is probably true for some readers. We think it is still the right call, for two reasons.
The first is that a wrong shortlist is worse than no shortlist, because it transfers the reader's caution to us. A reader who has been told a business is among the best in Britain stops asking questions in the consultation. That is the moment when the ranking has done actual harm, and we cannot see it happen.
The second is that the checks work. A reader who arrives with the register entry printed out, who asks who prescribes and whether hyaluronidase is on site, and who declines same day treatment, has done more to protect themselves than any list could do for them. That reader is also, incidentally, a customer that good clinics want and poor ones do not.
What we do publish about specific businesses
Nothing. We do not name clinics or practitioners in any context, including negative ones. We are not equipped to investigate individual businesses fairly, and a publication that names bad actors without the resources to substantiate the claim causes a different kind of harm. Complaints about specific practitioners belong with their regulator, with the ASA where the issue is advertising, and with Trading Standards where the issue is consumer law. We explain those routes in how to complain.