Why DoctorDirectory.ai exists

Why this site exists

Finding a doctor should not be an act of faith.

Right now it mostly is. You search, you get a list ordered by advertising spend and star ratings, and you pick someone. The ratings tell you about parking and waiting times. They tell you nothing about whether the person you are about to trust practices the way the evidence says to.

Meanwhile a real and growing number of licensed clinicians have moved away from that evidence. Some sell supplements from the same website where you book an appointment. Some prescribe compounded drugs that no regulator has reviewed. Some tell large audiences that vaccines are dangerous, that cholesterol does not matter, or that a hormone pellet will fix a problem it has never been shown to touch.

They have licenses. They come up in search. Nothing on a review site distinguishes them from the physician down the road who has spent twenty years keeping up with the guidelines.

This directory exists to make that distinction visible.

The misinformation problem

Medical misinformation used to travel slowly and from the fringe. It now travels instantly and, increasingly, from people with genuine medical credentials.

A physician with a large following can reach more people in an afternoon than they will treat in a career. When that reach is used to argue against vaccination, against statins, or against the basic idea that treatments should be tested before they are sold, the damage is not abstract. It shows up as measles in communities that had eliminated it, as untreated cardiovascular risk, and as people spending money on things that cannot work while the condition that could have been treated gets worse.

The usual defenses do not help here. A medical license does not lapse because someone says something untrue online. Board certification does not measure it. Review sites reward confidence and bedside manner, which the loudest voices tend to have in abundance.

So we look. Before a clinician appears here, we read their website and their public posts. Anti-vaccine messaging, anti-statin messaging, and content that contradicts the guidelines they would be attesting to are grounds for refusal, and they are grounds for removal later.

Why we care what a clinician sells

There is a difference between a doctor who recommends a treatment and a doctor who profits from the specific product they recommend.

The second arrangement is common and it is corrosive. A supplement line sold from the practice, an IV drip menu in the waiting room, hormone pellets implanted in the office, compounded weight-loss injections shipped monthly: each turns a clinical judgment into a sale. Even honest people are influenced by it, which is precisely why professional ethics have always treated it as a conflict rather than a business model.

The products themselves are often the problem too. Dietary supplements are not reviewed for effectiveness before sale, and testing repeatedly finds contents that do not match the label. Compounded medicines, including compounded semaglutide and compounded hormones, are not FDA reviewed for quality, potency or consistency, and dosing errors with them have put people in hospital. Peptides sold as research chemicals are not approved for human use at all.

So we ask every clinician to attest that they do not sell, prescribe for profit, or promote peptides, compounded medications, or unproven supplements sold with medical claims. We check their website before listing them, and we check it again every month. If any of it reappears, the listing is removed without a refund.

That rule costs us paying customers. It is the point of the place.

Unapproved and unproven treatments

The approval process is slow, imperfect, and occasionally wrong. It is still the only mechanism we have for finding out whether something works before it is sold to people who are frightened.

When a clinic offers stem cell injections for arthritis, chelation for heart disease, ozone therapy, or a hormone protocol built on a blood panel that no guideline recommends, the honest description is that nobody knows whether it helps, and in several of those cases we know it does not.

Patients who go down that road lose money, and sometimes they lose the window in which a treatment that does work would still have worked. That is the harm that does not show up in any complaint statistic.

We list clinicians who practice inside the evidence, and who will tell you plainly when the evidence is uncertain. Uncertainty honestly described is a sign of a good doctor. Certainty about something untested is the opposite.

Why we vet this hard

Every clinician here is checked before they appear and re-checked after.

We verify the license against the national registry and confirm it is active and unrestricted. We record board certifications. We ask for a dated attestation, for each condition they list, that they follow the current society guidelines. We search the state medical boards, Federal Trade Commission filings, court records and their public and social accounts. We read their website. A person makes every final decision, and a person reviews every appeal.

Then we do it again. Websites are re-checked monthly, a random sample is audited every month, attestations expire after a year, and anyone can report a profile from the page itself.

The rules themselves are reviewed at least once a year by our Medical Advisory Board, which is how we find out when they have grown too loose or too strict.

It is slower and more expensive than counting stars. It is the only approach that answers the question people are actually asking, which is not "is this doctor popular" but "can I trust this person with my mother".

The full method is on our how we vet page, including who can never be listed.

Why there are no reviews here

We do not publish patient reviews or star ratings, and we never will.

They can be bought, filtered and gamed. They punish doctors who say no to antibiotics and reward those who say yes. They are dominated by the small number of people angry or delighted enough to write, and they measure the front desk more than the medicine. A clinician who spends an extra twenty minutes delivering bad news honestly will rate worse than one who sends you home with a prescription you did not need.

What we publish instead is checkable: the license and when we verified it, the board certifications, the attestation and its date, when we last screened them, and their industry payments as reported to the federal Open Payments database.

You do not have to take our word for any of it. That is the design.

Who reviews our work

Our medical content and our vetting rules are reviewed by the Medical Advisory Board, a group of practicing clinicians drawn from the specialties this directory covers.

The board checks the eligibility rules and the attestation questions, signs off on guideline summaries and health articles before they go live, weighs in when a listing decision is genuinely arguable, and tells us when a guideline has been replaced. Board members are unpaid, deliberately, so that nobody checking our work has a financial stake in the answer.

It is chaired by Dr. Mohammed Alo, DO, FACC, a board-certified cardiologist and internist and a professor of medicine at two medical schools. He has spent decades teaching guideline-based care and correcting medical misinformation online, runs Alo Academy, and publishes his medical presentations on YouTube covering cardiology, heart failure, diabetes, dyslipidemia and obesity medicine.

The full membership, what the board does, and how to apply are on the Medical Advisory Board page.

Editorial policy

Everything we publish about a medical condition is written from the current guidelines of the relevant professional society, names that society, and carries a named reviewer and a date.

Medical content is reviewed by our Medical Advisory Board before it goes live, and the board flags anything that has drifted from what the societies actually recommend.

We correct errors rather than quietly deleting them. If a guideline is replaced, the page is updated and the version is shown. If we get something wrong and you tell us, we will fix it and say that we did.

We do not accept payment to change medical content, and no advertiser sees an article before it is published.

How we make money, plainly

Clinicians pay a monthly subscription to be listed, and sponsors pay for clearly labeled advertising.

Here is what that money does not buy. It does not buy a pass through vetting. It does not change the order of organic search results. It does not buy a review, because there are none. Featured placement is always labeled as such and sits in its own block, separate from the results.

Every clinician is verified before they can pay us anything, and paying does not stop us removing them if their website starts selling supplements next month.

Our advertising policy sets out what we refuse to advertise, which includes supplements, peptides, compounded medications, and anything that contradicts the guidelines our clinicians attest to.