How we research and review our guides
Our guides exist to help you understand care and ask good questions — not to sell you treatment. Here’s how they’re made, who checks them, and how we keep them honest.
Who writes and reviews them
Each guide is written in plain English by Vuemedics’s editorial team, checked line by line against the sources listed on the page, and then medically reviewed and signed off by a GMC-registered consultant on the Specialist Register before it’s published. Every guide carries the date it was signed off and the date it is next due for review.
We want to be precise about what that sign-off is, because it is the part readers rely on. Our clinical reviewer is one named-on-file consultant who reviews the whole library — not a different specialist for each field. They check that a guide is accurate, balanced, current against NHS, NICE and Royal College guidance, honest about risk, and safe in what it tells you to do when something goes wrong. They are not holding themselves out as a specialist in every condition the library covers, and a guide is not personal medical advice. For advice about your own care — and for anything specialty-specific — speak to the clinician treating you.
For now our reviewer is shown without a name; the review is real either way, and we may name reviewers in future. A guide that hasn’t completed review is clearly labelled as in review, and we never present unreviewed content as signed off. Spotted something wrong? Every guide has a “report an error” link, and we’d rather be corrected than be first.
The standards we follow
- Checked against guidance from the NHS, NICE, the GMC, and the relevant Royal College or specialist society (for cosmetic surgery, for example, BAAPS and BAPRAS).
- Written for a reading age of around 9 — the standard the NHS uses — so anyone can follow them.
- Risks are given equal billing with benefits, and are never trivialised.
- No pricing and no before-and-after photos, in line with responsible-advertising standards (ASA/CAP) and to avoid pressure-selling.
- No insecurity or scare framing — and no clinic can pay to appear in, or influence, a guide.
How we keep them current
Medicine moves on, so each signed-off guide carries a last-reviewed date and a planned next review. We update a guide whenever guidance changes or we spot something that could be clearer.
Independence and conflicts of interest
Vuemedics is clinician-owned, but the guides are editorial and the directory is neutral. Patient reviews are invitation-only, consent-recorded and independently moderated, and search results are ordered by rating, relevance and recency — never by who pays. Read our Trust Charter →
Spotted something that’s not right?
Tell us and we’ll review it quickly — accuracy matters to us more than being first. This is general information, and not a substitute for advice from your own clinician.