Advertising and conflicts-of-interest policy
The registry’s neutrality depends on a transparent funding model. This page documents what we do not accept, what we do accept, how any future sponsored content would be labelled, and how per-page conflicts are disclosed.
What we do not accept
- Payment for listings. Inclusion in the registry is editorial; clinics cannot buy in.
- Paid clinic visibility on tier rankings, search results, or facets. The tier a clinic carries reflects what we have verified — it cannot be paid for, upgraded for a fee, or rented.
- Referral commissions, lead-generation fees, or affiliate revenue from clinics or facilitators on patient bookings.
- Advertising from medical-tourism clinics, agencies, or facilitators on registry pages.
- Hidden treatment commissions of any kind.
- Co-branded content with clinics or facilitators.
- Guarantees of patient outcomes, success rates, or safety — from us or any party paying us.
What we do accept
- Subscription revenue from individual readers (where offered) and institutional subscribers (insurers, employers).
- Grant funding from charitable foundations whose remit is patient-safety or health-information transparency, with the grant terms published.
- Time-limited research partnerships with universities or non-profit health bodies, with conflict statements published per-page where applicable.
Sponsored content labelling
The registry does not currently publish sponsored content. If that ever changes, sponsored items will carry a visible Sponsored label at the top of the page, the funder will be named, the scope of the engagement will be disclosed, and the item will be excluded from search results filtered by verified registry content. Sponsored content will never determine a clinic’s verification tier or its appearance in flagged-clinic listings.
Affiliate links
The registry does not currently use affiliate links. If we ever add a non-clinic affiliate (for example, a travel-insurance comparison where the underwriter pays a small referral fee), the link will be labelled as an affiliate at the point of use, the relationship will be disclosed on this page, and editorial selection of partners will remain independent of payment.
Per-page conflict disclosure
Where a guide or piece of analysis is funded by an external party, the funder is named at the top of that page along with the scope of the engagement. If editorial judgment was constrained in any way, that constraint is also disclosed. Authors with relevant external relationships disclose them in their bylines at /team.
No paid removal of public-interest information
We will not remove a factual, sourced, public-interest claim in exchange for payment. Clinics that disagree with a published claim may submit a correction via /corrections with primary-source evidence; if the evidence is sound, the record is updated. If a clinic asks to be withdrawn from the registry, we record the withdrawal but preserve the historical record for the corrections log.
Reporting a perceived conflict
If you believe a registry entry has been influenced by an undisclosed financial relationship, raise it via /corrections. We will investigate and either correct the entry or publish a response.