Investigations.
Each month we investigate the companies selling weight-loss medication in one UK city, including registered pharmacies using underhanded tactics to sell prescription-only medicines and mislead patients. Documented, evidenced, published.
Boots on the ground, receipts on the page.
Pharmacy Score investigates the companies selling weight-loss medication in one UK city each month, starting with Leeds. Every investigation checks GPhC registrations, trading disclosures, advertising behaviour and consultation standards, including whether registered pharmacies are using underhanded tactics to sell prescription-only medicines (POMs) or mislead patients, and publishes only what the evidence supports.
Our directory tells you which pharmacies are registered and how real customers rate them. Investigations go further: we look closely at the sellers operating in one city at a time, who's properly registered, whose websites name a legal entity, whose consultations stand up, and whose don't. That includes registered pharmacies, because a GPhC number is not a character reference. Some of the worst behaviour in this market, rubber-stamp prescribing, pressure selling, misleading adverts, fake-looking review patterns, undeclared ownership of comparison sites, comes from companies that hold a valid registration and know exactly how to trade on it. Selling prescription-only medicines to the public carries strict legal and professional duties, and we check whether those duties are actually being met.
What each investigation checks
- Registration: every seller found is checked against the GPhC register, and the register entry is linked.
- Disclosure: does the site name its legal entity, company number and registered office, as UK law requires of business websites?
- Consultation standards: is a real prescriber reviewing orders, or is the assessment a rubber stamp waved through in seconds?
- Advertising & tactics: pressure selling, countdown-timer urgency, bait pricing, and POM promotion that pushes against the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 and ASA rulings.
- Honesty signals: genuine versus suspicious review patterns, and hidden ownership or undeclared funnels to pharmacies the site's owners run.
- Customer record: the provider's genuine Trustpilot history, complaints patterns included.
The ground rules
We publish what we can evidence, and we say plainly what we couldn't verify. Describing a tactic we're checking for is not an accusation against any specific company, if a company is named, the register entries, filings and records behind the naming are linked, and the company gets a right of reply before publication. If we get something wrong, the corrections route is open to the company like anyone else.
The series
- Leeds, in progress. The first city under the microscope.
Know something we should look at, a seller operating in Leeds, a consultation that wasn't, pressure tactics, a parcel that wasn't medicine? Tip us off: [email protected].