Transparency Score Methodology: How Every Point Is Earned

Verified Anti-Aging Clinics publishes a 0 to 100 Transparency Score for every clinic on which we hold primary-source data. It measures how much verifiable information a clinic publishes, not clinical quality, safety, or competence. A clinic can be excellent and score low simply because it does not publish its prices. This page states every condition behind every point, so that any two clinics can be compared on the same stated rules.

No part of this score can be purchased. A perfect 100 is reachable entirely from information a clinic publishes for free. Claiming a listing is free, and neither claiming nor paying for anything raises a score or affects ranking. Where we have collected nothing, we print "Not yet assessed" and no number, because a gap in our dataset is not evidence of anything about the clinic.

The seven factors

Points within a factor are all or nothing. A listing that fails any condition of a factor earns zero for that factor.

Published cash pricing, 30 points

At least one price on file must satisfy every condition below. Any single failure disqualifies that price, and if no price qualifies the clinic falls through to patient-reported pricing instead.

• The source is the clinic's own website, or a price the clinic confirmed to us directly. No other source is eligible.
• A confidence score of at least 4 out of 5, reflecting how recent and how well sourced the figure is.
• A citable source URL is recorded. A price without one fails our build and cannot be published at all.
• Reported within the last 365 days. Older prices are hidden and stop scoring.
• Not contested. Where patients report paying materially differently and the clinic has not reconciled it, the price is suspended until resolved.
• Not superseded. A price the clinic has since replaced no longer counts, unless the replacement is itself contested.
• It is a treatment price. Memberships, enrollment fees, travel fees and float packages are useful disclosure but are not treatment prices.

Patient-reported pricing, 15 points

Awarded only when no clinic-published price qualifies. This is why one clinic shows 30 and another 15: 15 means we hold no qualifying published price for that clinic and the figure came from patients instead. The two never add together.

• At least three independent patient reports for the same treatment. Fewer than three are never displayed and never scored.
• At least three of those reports carry a usable numeric price.
• We publish the lowest, highest, and median figure, the number of reports, and the most recent report date, so the spread is visible rather than a single averaged number.
• Superseded the moment the clinic publishes a qualifying list price, which replaces this 15 with the full 30.

Active state-board licensed provider, 30 points

A named provider whose licence we confirmed active against the issuing state board as a primary source. Every condition is enforced when the site is built, and a failure stops publication rather than quietly scoring lower.

• The claim carries its evidence: the primary-source page we read, the licence number we found there, and the issuing state or board.
• The source link resolves to that specific licence record. A board home page, a bare domain, or a search form carrying no record identifier is rejected, and two providers may never share one source link.
• The clinic's state is resolved from its own address or a postal-code index, never inferred from how we grouped it geographically.
• The licence class can lawfully deliver the care the listing advertises. A genuine, active licence in a class carrying no prescriptive authority earns no points and no badge. We do not assert that such a clinic has done anything wrong; it may employ a prescriber it does not name. What we can stand behind is narrower: we have not confirmed a provider who could lawfully deliver the advertised care, and unknown earns nothing.
• Where a class prescribes only under supervision, the supervising physician is named, numbered, and holds a class that prescribes independently.
• One licence earns this at one clinic. Where a single licence appears across several locations with no designated primary practice, it earns points at none of them.

Named provider only, 5 points

The clinic publishes a clinician's name and we have not confirmed that person's licence against a state board. This is not a partial verification; it is an unverified listing that at least discloses who is responsible, which is worth more to a patient than silence. A federal provider identifier record earns nothing, because we do not perform those lookups and will not present them as verification. This is replaced by the full 30 once a licence is confirmed, and the two do not add together.

Itemized fee structure disclosed, 20 points

All three conditions are required.

• The clinic has confirmed something to us directly, as defined below. Automated detection alone never earns this factor.
• The disclosure separates the individual costs a patient will meet: laboratory work, consultations, follow-up visits, and medication, injection or pellet fees.
• A citable source URL for the disclosure is on file.

The confirmation requirement exists because an automated sweep matched the phrase "free consultation" as an itemized fee structure across twenty-five clinics. Seventeen carried no dollar figure anywhere in the evidence, and twenty cited only a home page. Fees and contract terms together are the largest total a clinic can hold without a confirmed licence, so awarding them on pattern-matching would have built our first High Transparency tier out of call-to-action buttons. Automated detection is now treated as a prompt to ask the clinic, never as a score.

Contract and subscription terms disclosed, 15 points

All three conditions are required, on the same basis as itemized fees.

• The clinic has confirmed the disclosure to us directly. Automated detection alone never earns this factor.
• The disclosure covers commitment length, cancellation policy, automatic-renewal behaviour, and refund rules.
• A citable source URL for the disclosure is on file.

Direct contact details published, 5 points

A listed phone line and an active website. This is a supporting point and never triggers an assessment by itself. Were contact details enough alone, roughly 1,800 clinics would carry a published grade built on no transparency data at all, so a clinic with nothing but contact details remains Not yet assessed.

What counts as confirmation, and why it caps a score

Itemized fees and contract terms both require confirmation, and confirmation also lifts the 30-point ceiling described below. A clinic is confirmed when any one of the following is true. All three are free.

• At least one price the clinic itself attested to us, with no unresolved dispute against it.
• Fee or contract disclosures submitted by the clinic through its profile. This is recorded separately from anything our crawler detected, so a detected disclosure can never confirm itself.
• A provider licence we confirmed active against a state licensing board.

Claiming a profile is not by itself confirmation. Claiming is a workflow step; confirmation means the clinic stood behind specific information.

Where a clinic is unconfirmed, its score is capped at 30, and the capped amount appears as an explicit line in that clinic's breakdown so the listed factors always add up to the published number. The cap is a statement about the strength of our evidence rather than a finding about the clinic: two identical clinics can differ by 30 points purely because one publishes plain pages our crawler can read and the other uses a booking widget or a PDF menu. Differences between unconfirmed clinics are noise, and we will not rank clinics against each other on it.

A disputed attestation is suspended rather than penalised. Where patients report paying materially more than a clinic attested, we no longer hold a confirmation until it is reconciled, and the clinic returns to what its own published pages support. Attesting a false price therefore gains nothing and costs the confirmation the clinic already had.

Score bands, and why the top band needs both halves

• The most a clinic can reach without a confirmed licence is 75, being 30 pricing, 5 named provider, 20 fees, 15 contract terms and 5 contact. Disclosure alone cannot reach the top band.
• A confirmed licence plus published pricing plus contact details is 65. Verification alone cannot reach the top band either.
• Reaching 100 requires 30 pricing, 30 confirmed licence, 20 itemized fees, 15 contract terms and 5 contact details together.

Credential verification is separate and unscored

The credential badge is a distinct signal, awarded only when a named provider's licence is confirmed active against a state licensing board as a primary source. It adds no points here. Credential verification is free, and we accept no payment from clinics for anything on this site: no badge, no placement, no points. A failed or inconclusive check earns no badge, and we do not publish check failures. We have no access to the National Practitioner Data Bank, and there is no public federal controlled-substance registration lookup, so we make no claim about either.

Why the weights changed

Pricing previously carried 45 points. A clinic could reach 75 on price and a licence while disclosing nothing about how it charges, so pricing moved to 30 while itemized fees moved from 10 to 20 and contract terms from 10 to 15. Those two are what stop a patient meeting an unexpected bill, and only the clinic can supply them. A former 15-point tier for a federal identifier record was removed outright because it described a check we do not perform. A 30-point ceiling for unconfirmed clinics was added afterwards, and claiming a profile stopped lifting it, because clicking a claim button is not evidence about the data.

Corrections

Clinic owners, medical directors and authorised representatives may submit corrections, updated licence documentation, or profile updates to [email protected]. Submissions are reviewed within 48 business hours. See also our pricing methodology for where each individual price comes from.