Three paid links, published refusals, and a rule a payment cannot reach

Three companies are linked for money on this site, and the two treatments at the top of its own index are not among them — they pay nothing at all. Both of those facts are deliberate, and this page is where they are written down.

The three that are paid

• Two telehealth services. They are a route to a prescriber, not a treatment, and they appear only where the question is how somebody reaches a clinician. Neither is reviewed here, neither is compared with the other, and neither is a recommendation to take a medicine.
• One low-level laser cap. It sits in tier B on this site's own scale, below both tier A entries, and the row that links it also prints why it is not tier A.

Every one of those links is written as /go/ plus a key, carries rel="sponsored nofollow", is excluded from search-engine crawling in this site's robots file, and is labelled where it sits rather than in a footer. No tracking URL is ever pasted into an article.

No affiliate account has been approved for this domain yet. Until one is, those three links point at the providers' own home pages and earn nothing whatsoever. When an account is approved the destination changes and no word of the surrounding copy does.

The things that pay nothing, and are recommended anyway

The two treatments this index grades highest are a generic topical sold off a pharmacy shelf and a generic tablet filled on a prescription. Neither runs an affiliate programme this site could join. They are named first anyway, on every page where the question comes up, because the rule put them there.

The same is true of the advice that comes before any product at all: see a GP or a board-certified dermatologist, and find out what is actually happening before buying anything. That pays nothing too, and it remains the single most useful sentence on this site.

What has been turned down

Refusing things is part of the product, so the refusals are published rather than filed.

• Hair-replacement and clinic referral programmes. One open programme was available for this lane and was left out: the company's own site says it is uniting with a hair-restoration business this network does not link, and the category — hair systems and non-surgical replacement — is cosmetic camouflage rather than treatment, which this index does not grade in the first place.
• A laser-cap brand with a regulatory history. Not linked, on a network-wide decision, and named nowhere on this site.
• A telehealth brand whose affiliate terms could not be confirmed at source. No link until they can be.
• Clinic facilitators and medical-tourism marketplaces. They are paid by clinics, not by publishers, and a site that tells readers to vet a clinic cannot take a fee from an unvetted one.
• Affiliate marketplaces selling hair-loss information products. The claims in that category are the opposite of everything this index is for.
• Pharmacy-style prescription offers. Not taken. This site does not sell a route around a prescriber.

A published refusal cannot be quietly reversed. If one ever changes, this page changes first and says what changed.

What a payment could not buy

A grade. The rule is published in full on the grading rule page, every answer behind every grade is printed in the table on the index, and the arithmetic is two ranked questions with the worse answer winning. If a paid link ever appeared above something it should sit below, the table itself would show it.