Editorial policy

Who writes Afters content?

Afters content is written and maintained by the Afters editorial team. No fabricated reviewer names, no invented doctors, no fake "medical review boards" — any clinician credited by name is real, credentialed, and has consented to the attribution.

The honest part: earlier in our history we published content attributed to a review board that did not exist. We removed it, and preventing that class of mistake is now the first rule of this policy.

Where do the statistics come from?

Every platform statistic we publish — result counts, practice counts, metro breakdowns — is computed directly from the Afters database, refreshed nightly, and traceable to a query. External facts (safety data, national cost averages) cite named sources: ASPS surgeon-fee data, peer-reviewed literature. A number without a source is a guess, and we don’t publish guesses.

Our national cost ranges are researched figures. Where we ever show modeled estimates (derived math rather than measured prices), we label them as modeled — and we do not publish city-level modeled prices as data.

What counts as a verified result?

A verified before-and-after result is a photo or video uploaded by the treating practice to its own Afters profile — never stock imagery, never scraped from other sites, never AI-generated. Fail verification, don’t appear. That’s the whole test.

Practices cannot pay for placement or ranking anywhere on Afters. The full verification process is on our methodology page.

How is medical accuracy handled?

We write about risks plainly, name the honest downsides of procedures (scars, recovery, longevity limits), and skip superlatives like "best surgeon." Cosmetic surgery content is health content, and we would rather lose the click than shade the truth.

Nothing on Afters is medical advice — decisions about surgery belong in a consultation with a licensed clinician.

How do corrections work?

When we find an error — ourselves, or via a reader or practice report — we correct the page and its underlying data promptly, on the record. Practices can claim their profile to correct facts directly, and contested claims are suppressed while under review.