Who writes this, and who doesn't

What this is

The Wider Part is an independent publication about hair loss in women. It is written by a small editorial desk that reads primary sources — drug labels on DailyMed, guidance from the American Academy of Dermatology, clinical guidelines, trial papers on PubMed, regulators' own pages and, where a company is publicly listed, its filings — and writes down what they say, with the date each one was read.

It is not a clinic, not a pharmacy, not a telehealth service and not a brand. It sells nothing directly. Some outbound links are marked partner links, and the page about money names every one of them and every programme we refuse.

Who reviews it

Nobody with a medical licence. That sentence is here because the alternative — implying otherwise — is the commonest dishonesty in health publishing, and it is worth being unambiguous about.

There is no medical reviewer on this site. No page here is reviewed by a doctor, a dermatologist, a pharmacist or a nurse before publication. You will never see a "medically reviewed by" byline, a stethoscope badge, or a claim that our content is doctor-approved, because none of those would be true. Every page that discusses a medicine, a device, a supplement or surgery carries a visible note saying exactly that, and pointing you to someone who can examine you.

What we can do is read carefully, quote precisely, date everything and show our working. What we cannot do is diagnose you, and the difference between those two things is the whole basis on which this site is written.

The rules we work to

• Fragile facts carry a source and a read date. Prices, label wording, study figures and regulatory statements are recorded with where they came from and when. What cannot be verified at a primary source is left out rather than softened.
• No invented numbers. No statistics we did not read somewhere checkable, no "nine in ten women", no illustrative percentages, no results we measured ourselves. This desk has tested nothing and treated nobody.
• No before-and-after photographs. They are the most persuasive and least verifiable thing published in this field, and no amount of search demand for them changes that.
• No dosing. Strengths are described as the label prints them. What to take, how much and how often is decided by a label and a prescriber.
• No fabricated people. No patient quotes, no case studies, no "our editor tried it", no user star ratings.
• No clinics or surgeons ranked, and no referral fees taken from any of them.
• Where the honest answer pays us nothing, it goes first — a pharmacy generic, a blood test, an appointment — and we say plainly that it pays us nothing.

How the grading works

Treatments are graded on one question: what has been tested in women? A randomised, placebo-controlled trial in women outranks a trial in men, which outranks a case series, which outranks a questionnaire the seller commissioned. Products scored out of ten are scored on a published four-part scale — trials in women, who funded and wrote them, whether the price and exit are in the open, and whether the real cautions are stated where a buyer will see them — and every score printed here shows its four parts so it can be argued with.

When we are wrong

Prices move, labels are revised, studies are retracted and pages go out of date. If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets corrected with a note about what changed. Corrections are not embarrassing; a health page that has never been corrected is either very new or not being checked.

What we would like you to do with it

Read the relevant page, write down two or three questions, and take them to someone who can look at your scalp. The best outcome for this site is that a reader arrives at an appointment knowing what to ask, and spends less money than she would have done otherwise.