How this site is paid, and what it refuses

This site can earn money from two links, and from nothing else. There is no advertising, no sponsored post, no paid review, no affiliate link hidden inside a sentence, and no arrangement with a clinic. This page describes the whole of it.

The two links

Wherever a paid link appears, it is marked on the page, it sits behind a /go/ address on this domain, it carries rel="sponsored nofollow" so search engines know what it is, and there is a plain-language note beside it. The two are:

• A general retailer. For readers who want to see what unbranded, over-the-counter minoxidil looks like when it is not in a branded box. It is a shop link, not a recommendation to take a medicine.
• One telehealth service. Named only where the honest answer to a question is "this needs a clinician". It is compared as a service — who the clinician is, what the consultation involves, how it is cancelled — and never as a way to obtain a drug.

That is the list. If a third ever joins it, it will be described here before it appears anywhere else.

What a marked link does not buy

A payment has never decided a sentence on this site, and the structure makes that easy to check: there is no product ranking here, no score out of ten, and no "best minoxidil" page for a payment to influence. We do not review minoxidil products at all, because judging one carton against another when the two lines that matter are identical would be theatre.

The answers this site gives most often pay it nothing:

• Buy the generic. The house-brand carton and the national brand carry the same active ingredient line.
• A pharmacy counter, a supermarket or a warehouse club is a perfectly good place to buy it.
• If the hair loss is sudden, patchy, painful or unexplained, see a general practitioner or a board-certified dermatologist first. No website earns anything from that appointment, and it is still the right advice.

What this site refuses, and why

These are decisions, not oversights. A refusal that is not published is not a refusal, so here they are.

• No prescription medicine is ever sold or promoted through a link here. Oral minoxidil is prescription-only and off-label for hair; nothing on this site routes anyone to it.
• No compounding pharmacy, and no "custom formula" seller. Compounded preparations are not approved products, and we are not in a position to vet one.
• No clinic, no surgeon, no medical-travel facilitator. This site does not rank or recommend anyone's clinical practice.
• No ClickBank or Digistore24 hair-loss offers. The category is built on claims no label would be allowed to make.
• No pharmacy-style affiliate networks whose offers change by country and carry regulatory risk we cannot audit from here.
• No device or "laser" brand that has been the subject of a regulator's attention, unless the regulatory fact itself has been read at the regulator's own website. We did not read one for this build, so none is named.
• No programme that pays for a lead we would have to collect. There is no form on this site and no list to join.
• No brand bidding, no coupon pages, no discount codes for a medicine.

Independence, stated plainly

If the best answer to a reader's question is the free one or the cheap one, that is the answer we print, and we say it pays us nothing rather than leaving it to be noticed. That is the only arrangement under which a site about a medicine is worth reading at all.

Questions about any of this, including "who paid for that sentence", go to [email protected] and will be answered.