How We Rank Clinics

Short version: clinics sort by verifiable numbers — price per graft first — never by who pays us. Here's the whole method, including its current limits.

Where the data comes from

• Published clinic pricing — package prices and price-per-graft rates from clinics' own sites and published offers. A clinic that publishes package prices and no per-graft rate is shown with its packages and no per-graft figure: we never divide a published package into a per-graft rate and present it as the clinic's own.
• Primary-source checks — accreditation claims verified against the issuing bodies (Turkish Ministry of Health, JCI) where possible.
• Patient-reported quotes — used to cross-check published prices as we collect them; user-verified prices and reviews are on the roadmap.

Verified vs unverified

Every clinic starts unverified and stays that way until we confirm its data against primary sources. Verified profiles show a "last checked" date. We'd rather show you an honest "approx — unverified" than a confident number nobody checked. Prices change; treat every figure as a starting point and get a written quote.

Ranking rules

• Default sort is price per graft, cheapest first — the one number that makes quotes comparable.
• Filters (city, technique, budget) narrow the same list; they never inject anyone.
• Paid placement cannot change order. If we ever add sponsored slots, they'll be labeled as such — see the affiliate disclosure.
• Medical claims are kept deliberately conservative. A medical reviewer will join the process as the guide library grows; until then, nothing here is medical advice.

How the "best clinics" lists are ranked

The directory sorts by price. Our best-clinics lists do something different, because cheapest is not the same as best. They score each clinic only on things we can verify against a primary source:

• Accreditation, weighted by how hard it is to earn (up to 45 points). A surgeon society vets the doctor — hair-restoration societies (ISHRS, ABHRS, IAHRS) are the strongest signal for this specific procedure, and a general aesthetic-plastic-surgery society (ISAPS) counts in the same band, though it isn't hair-specific. A hospital accreditation (JCI, TEMOS, AACI) audits the facility. A Ministry of Health licence is table stakes for operating legally. An ISO certificate audits paperwork, not surgery. They are not worth the same, so we don't score them the same.
• Names its surgeon (20 points). A clinic that tells you who will operate has answered the single most important question you can ask. One that won't has made a choice, and that choice is now priced into its rank. We check every clinic's own website and record what we find — including when the answer is nobody.
• Years in operation (up to 20 points). A clinic that has traded through two decades of scrutiny is a different proposition from one that opened last year.
• Publishes its prices (10 points). Only 8 of the 36 clinics we track put their rates on their own site. Every other figure on this site is our estimate, and we label it as ours.
• The list is generated from the database, not written by hand — it re-orders itself as we verify new clinics. No clinic can pay to move up.
• Agencies are excluded from best-clinic lists. A medical-tourism facilitator books you into someone else's hospital; it doesn't operate. It stays in the directory, labelled, but it cannot be a "best clinic" because it cannot answer the question the list asks.

Named surgeon is weighted above published prices on purpose. You find out the price eventually. You may never find out who was holding the punch.

What that score deliberately leaves out: surgical outcomes. We have no verified outcome data, and a medical site that invents an outcome number is lying to you. A high rank means a clinic's credentials check out — not that it will give you the best hairline. Use the lists as a shortlist to research, not a verdict.

Current limits (honesty section)

• Coverage is Turkey-only — Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Izmir. Other countries are being added.
• 28 of our 36 clinics don't publish prices. Those figures are our estimates, built from their package pages and comparable clinics, and every one is labelled as an estimate. We'd rather show you our workings than a confident number we made up.
• If a clinic's site blocks us, its page stays silent about the surgeon until a human checks it by hand. Four clinics blocked our crawler; we opened each one in a browser and recorded what we found. We will never accuse a clinic of concealing its surgeon on the strength of a failed page load — an empty field means "not yet checked", not "guilty".
• We rank credentials and disclosure, not surgical skill. We can tell you a clinic is ISHRS-accredited and names Dr. X. We cannot tell you Dr. X will give you a good hairline. Nobody can, from a database.
• We still have no outcome data, and a medical site that invents an outcome number is lying to you. A high rank means the credentials check out — not that the result will be good.
• Patient reports are live but new. We publish what people say they were quoted, what they paid, and who actually operated — moderated by a human, and we say "patients report", never "this clinic does X". Two independent reports minimum before we'll draw any pattern from them.

Check our work yourself

Everything described above is published as data. The dataset is a free download under CC BY 4.0 and includes the half nobody else publishes — every clinic we checked and did not list, with what we observed and the date we observed it. If our standards are wrong, that file is what you need to prove it.

Spot an error? Tell us — corrections ship fast. Run a clinic that is not here? Ask us to check it — free, on exactly these terms, and the outcome may be a listing or a published rejection.