What we don't cover (yet)
A one-person editorial operation cannot cover everything. Stating clearly what we do not cover is itself a trust signal: it lets you decide whether we are the right reference for the question you are trying to answer. This page is updated as the cohort grows; if your question falls outside the listed scope, we may not be the right source today.
Categories we have not vetted yet
We currently cover compounded GLP-1, brand-name GLP-1, hormone-TRT, and DTC lab testing. The categories below are intentionally not yet in scope:
Bioidentical hormone replacement (BHRT) for women
Distinct from male testosterone replacement; involves pellets, creams, and compounded estrogen / progesterone protocols with their own regulatory and quality-control questions. We have not built out a vetting process for this category yet. If you are evaluating BHRT providers, our hormone-TRT methodology does not transfer cleanly.
Multi-modal longevity clinics (in-person)
Modern Age, Biograph, Fountain Life, Elitra Health, and other multi-modal in-person longevity clinics with $5,000+/year all-inclusive memberships. The trust questions are different (in-person care delivery, real-estate footprint, more comprehensive testing including imaging) and the public-record signal is thinner than the DTC categories we cover. Worth covering eventually; not today.
Peptide compounding outside GLP-1
BPC-157, TB-500, GHK-Cu, growth-hormone-releasing peptides, and similar non-GLP-1 peptides are sold through both telehealth platforms and research-only channels. The legal landscape varies meaningfully (most are not FDA-approved drugs), and the gray-market provider mix makes the same vetting-rubric harder to apply cleanly. Our peptide content pages explain the science and evidence; we do not currently rank peptide-source providers because we cannot do that with our usual rigor.
IV therapy and concierge wellness clinics
Restore Hyper Wellness, IV Doc, The Drip Bar, and similar in-person IV-vitamin / cryotherapy / red-light franchises. Different category structurally (in-person retail rather than telehealth) and we have not yet built the scope here.
Mental-health telehealth (separate from hormone or weight loss)
Cerebral, Talkspace, Hims Mental Health, BetterHelp, and other mental-health-specific telehealth platforms. Some of the providers we cover (Hims, Ro) operate mental-health verticals, and we don't currently rate them on that vertical. Our methodology is built for medication-and-pharmacy questions; mental-health vetting has different signals.
Providers we know about but have not reviewed yet
Within the categories we cover, the following providers exist and would be reasonable additions but have not been vetted with our usual rigor:
Compounded GLP-1: Fella Health, Willow Health (both named in the same April 2025 Eli Lilly lawsuit as Henry Meds and Mochi), Lavender Health, Joi Women's Wellness, MEDVi (already named in the September 2025 FDA warning-letter wave; a profile here would be useful for completeness).
Brand-name GLP-1: PlushCare, Sesame, traditional primary-care platforms with weight-loss verticals. The Ro and Hims coverage we have today is the cohort core; expanding here matters for users without insurance who can't use Ro/Hims for branded GLP-1.
Hormone-TRT: Vault Health, Henry (the men's health platform, distinct from Henry Meds GLP-1), Joi for Men, Restore-TRT, Fountain TRT. The Hone / Defy / Marek / Maximus cohort covers the most-trafficked options, but the broader market has more depth than our four-provider coverage suggests.
Lab testing: SiPhox Health (at-home blood testing), Quest Direct (consumer-direct of the underlying lab partner Function uses), Empower DX, Imaware, MyKlarity. Our Function / InsideTracker / Tally cohort covers different shapes of the category but the broader DTC lab market is much larger.
If a provider on this list is one you specifically want vetted, tell us and we will prioritize it in the next review cycle. Provider suggestions are the most actionable feedback we receive.
Things we want to verify but cannot
Sometimes a question we want to answer cleanly is not answerable from public records. Where we have not been able to verify a claim independently, we flag it explicitly on the provider profile rather than fabricate certainty. The most common categories:
LegitScript certification on a public registry
LegitScript Healthcare Merchant Certification gates Google and Meta advertising for telehealth and pharmacy merchants, so we can infer certification from the fact that a provider advertises on those platforms. But LegitScript does not publish a public per-merchant directory we can confirm against. We mark LegitScript as "unverified" (with the inference noted) when the provider does not display the certification badge prominently and we cannot confirm via a public registry.
Specific compounding-pharmacy partner per fill
Most compounded-GLP-1 providers route prescriptions to a network of partner pharmacies, but rarely surface which partner filled a given prescription. Vertical integration (the provider owns the pharmacy) makes this answerable; partner-network models do not. Where the partner is not named per fill, we flag it.
Per-batch testing programs and CoAs
Some compounding pharmacies publish per-batch certificates of analysis (CoAs) for every fill; most do not. Where a provider claims CoAs without publishing them publicly, we mark the claim "stated, not confirmed." We do not currently send specimens for independent third-party testing (it's on the methodology page roadmap as Tier-4 verification but cost-prohibitive for a one-person operation today).
State-by-state physician licensure for individual providers
We verify that a telehealth platform claims 50-state coverage and that the operating entity is licensed where it claims to be. Verifying that a specific prescribing physician is licensed in a specific state at the moment of a specific prescription is beyond our scope; that is a state-medical-board question rather than a directory question.
Open editorial questions
Questions we have not resolved internally and where reader perspective would actually shift our editorial position:
How heavily should we weight a Trustpilot suspected-fraudulent-review notice relative to the headline rating? Currently we weight the notice more heavily. Some readers may prefer the headline number even with the caveat. Open to feedback.
How do we handle an active manufacturer lawsuit that's about marketing rather than product safety? Currently we list the case prominently in regulatory history and note its scope. We do not exclude providers solely for active marketing-claim litigation. Some readers might expect us to.
Should we accept affiliate referral fees from providers in the lower half of our cohort? Today we are open to affiliate relationships with any provider that meets our rubric. There's a credibility argument for declining affiliate money from providers we score below 3.0 on a 0-5 scale (currently Henry Meds at 2.7 and Mochi at 2.8). We have not committed either way.
How should we surface providers we declined to list? A few providers were considered for inclusion but did not make it past Tier-1 verification (typically: state-licensure issues or no publicly verifiable operating entity). We do not currently publish a "declined" list because it implies a more rigorous declined-list curation process than we actually run. Open to changing this.
The point of this page
Trust journalism is calibrated. A source that knows what it does not know is more reliable than one that pretends to know everything. This page exists so you can use Designing Longevity inside its actual scope rather than outside it. For questions outside our scope, the right answer is often a different source; for questions inside our scope, the rigor we apply is documented on the methodology page.
Last updated May 1, 2026.