Transparency & Disclosure
The provider’s overall openness — honest disclosure about sourcing, pricing, care model, risks, and efficacy, and the absence of upsell-mill behavior.
Why it matters
Transparency is the through-line of the whole methodology: a provider that discloses fully lets you make an informed choice, and one that hides the ball is choosing for you. Opacity is itself the finding.
How we assess it
We reward what is disclosed and penalize what is conspicuously not.
- Openness on sourcing, pricing, and care model
- Honest risk and efficacy disclosure — no overselling
- Anti-upsell / anti-mill behavior
- Currency of information — is it kept up to date
Source types: A read across the provider’s entire public surface — what it says plainly, and what it conspicuously omits.
How we score it
Full, current, honest disclosure scores high. Hidden pricing, oversold efficacy, buried risks, or an upsell-mill pattern is penalized — and because opacity is scored as the brand’s own choice, missing disclosure lowers the subscore rather than being excused.
- Importance
- Critical
Critical — the most heavily weighted tier. Transparency is the factor the entire "openly-published methodology" positioning rests on, so failing it caps a provider’s ceiling.
- Scope
- Universal — applies to every provider
What this tier is worth
Not medical advice
- Scope
- Universal — applies to every provider
How this shows up in real reviews
Cited evidence we captured on this factor in live provider reviews.
- SkinnyRx
SkinnyRx names a Medical Director on its product pages (Sajad Zalzala, M.D.) and publishes per-lot quality-control disclosure against named standards: potency within plus or minus 10% of labelled concentration, sterility to USP 797.1 tested every batch, a pH test, and bacterial endotoxin limits to USP 85, which SkinnyRx describes as third-party testing "through FDA- and DEA-compliant labs ... for every compounded lot". Compounded-not-FDA-approved disclaimers appear on every product page and in the site footer, and a Privacy Policy (last updated 2026-05-20) links a HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices. CONFIRMED ABSENT ON THE RENDERED PAGE, 2026-08-23 - not merely unretrieved: the compounding pharmacies are never named, only referred to as "our partner pharmacies", "503A pharmacies" and "a partner pharmacy"; and no individual prescribing clinician is named, only "All our providers are based
- Gala Health
Two things are disclosed well and two are not. Gala labels compounded GLP-1 as not FDA-approved repeatedly and prominently, including in its own pricing footnote and throughout its FAQ, and it publishes BMI thresholds and the labelled contraindications on the drug pages. Against that: it names no compounding pharmacy, saying only that it works with “a wide network of pharmacies across all 50 states”; it names no individual clinician; and its homepage displays the logos of Harvard Medical School, Columbia University Medical Center and Mount Sinai under a line claiming where its doctors trained and practised, with no clinician named and nothing published to check the affiliation against.