Review Policy
Lipedema Clinic Limited
Last updated: August 2026
1. About This Policy
This Review Policy governs reviews published in the Lipedema Clinic directory at lipedemaclinic.org, including reviews of practices, clinics, and individual health professionals (each a “provider”). It applies to everyone who writes, reads, responds to, or is described in a review.
The directory is operated by Lipedema Clinic Limited (“we”, “us”, “our”), a company registered in New Zealand.
Registered office: Care of Lipedema Clinic, 3 Picton Avenue, Addington, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand
Company number: 9274322 · NZBN: 9429052331305
Contact: support@lipedemaclinic.org
This policy forms part of, and should be read alongside, our Terms and Conditions and our Privacy Policy. Where this policy and the Terms and Conditions conflict on a matter specific to reviews, this policy applies. It is governed by the laws of New Zealand, and nothing in it limits or overrides your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, the Fair Trading Act 1986, the Privacy Act 2020, the Defamation Act 1992, or any other applicable New Zealand legislation.
2. Our Role — We Are the Platform, Not the Publisher
We are the platform, not the publisher. We host what patients write; we do not verify, endorse or adjudicate whether an account is true.
A review published in this directory is the statement of the person who wrote it. It is not our statement, and it is not a finding we have made about a provider. We do not confirm that a described appointment took place, we do not investigate what was said or done in a consulting room, and we do not decide who is right when a reviewer and a provider disagree about what happened.
We do apply the content rules in section 5, and we remove reviews that breach them. That is a content standard, not a test of truth. Neither the removal of a review nor its continued presence should be read as us taking a position on whether it is accurate, and no star rating or aggregate score is a statement by us about a provider’s competence.
This is the position taken by general review platforms including Google, Yelp and Trustpilot, and we have adopted it deliberately. A directory that quietly arbitrated whose version of an appointment was correct would be neither honest with readers nor fair to providers.
Reviews are not medical advice and are not a substitute for professional care. Whether a provider is right for you is a decision for you and your clinical team.
3. Who May Leave a Review
3.1 First-Hand Experience
You may review a provider if you have first-hand experience of them in one of three capacities: as a patient, as the caregiver or support person for a patient, or as an attendee at a talk or event they gave. You must declare which applies when you submit.
Reviews based on reputation, hearsay, or something you read elsewhere are not accepted. A rating that shapes another woman’s search should come from experience.
3.2 Account Required
You must be signed in to a Lipedema Clinic account to leave a review, and you must be at least 16 years of age. Requiring an account ties each review to an identifiable person, even though what other members see is only a shortened display name (section 14).
3.3 One Account Per Person
You must not create additional accounts, use another person’s account, or ask or pay another person to leave a review on your behalf, in order to post more than one review of the same provider or to conceal a conflict of interest.
4. What a Review Contains
A review consists of a star rating, your declared relationship to the provider, the month and year of your experience, optional tags describing that experience, and an optional free-text comment. Only the star rating and the relationship are required.
The tag list includes critical options as well as positive ones, and they are displayed together. We do not filter, reorder, or suppress reviews on the basis of how favourable they are.
5. What Is Not Allowed
5.1 The Standard
Colourful language and imagery are fine. There is no place for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, or other displays of bigotry.
To be explicit, because people ask: ordinary swearing is allowed. So is anger, sarcasm, and bluntness. A furious one-star account of an appointment that went badly is welcome here, and we will not remove it for being unflattering, unkind, or hard for the provider to read. That is what this directory is for. The next woman searching needs to know what actually happened to you.
5.2 Prohibited Content
A review must not contain:
- —Threats of violence or harm, harassment, or content directed at intimidating a person
- —Lewd or sexually explicit material
- —Hate speech, or content attacking a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or body size
- —Another person’s personal information — a full name, address, phone number, email address, employment details, or health information belonging to anyone other than yourself, including other patients and a provider’s staff or family
- —Advertising or promotional content, including links to a business, referral or affiliate codes, and recommendations to use a competing provider or product
- —Medical advice presented as fact — telling other readers what treatment, dose, surgery, or diagnosis they should have. Describing what was done to you, and what happened as a result, is not medical advice and is welcome
- —Content that is not about a real care experience, including reviews of a person you have never met, commentary on a public dispute, and reviews written to settle a grievance unrelated to care
- —Empty or unreadable submissions — blank comments, single characters, keyboard mashing, duplicated text, or machine-generated filler
- —Material you do not have the right to publish (section 9)
We may remove a review that breaches this section, ask its author to edit it, or suspend an account that breaches it repeatedly.
6. The Reviewer Stands Behind Their Own Review
A review is the reviewer’s own statement, and the reviewer is responsible for it.
Most people who write here are telling the truth about something that hurt them. This section is not aimed at them, and it is not a warning to stay quiet. It exists so that nobody is surprised later by something we could have said plainly at the start.
When you publish a review you are making a public statement about a named person or business. Publishing under a shortened display name does not make your review anonymous in law and does not remove your responsibility for what it says. We hold account information for every reviewer, and we may be required to disclose it if a court orders us to.
If a review is defamatory, the consequences of that fall on its author, not on Lipedema Clinic. We do not indemnify reviewers, we do not fund or conduct their defence, and by publishing a review you accept responsibility for its content.
The practical protection is straightforward, and it is what a lawyer would tell you: write about what actually happened to you. Describe your own experience, say how it felt, and be as direct about it as you want to be. Do not state as fact something you do not know to be true — for example, an allegation of criminal conduct or fraud, a claim about a provider’s qualifications or registration you have not checked, or an account of what happened to a different patient. An honest description of your own visit, and an opinion that reads as your opinion, are both the safest and the most useful things you can write.
7. Conflicts of Interest
You must not review:
- —Your own practice, or a practice you own a share of
- —Your current or former employer, or a colleague at your own practice
- —A competitor, or any provider you have a commercial reason to see rated lower
- —A family member, partner, or close friend
- —Any provider where you have been offered a discount, gift, refund, or payment in exchange for a review, or asked to remove a review in exchange for one
Providers must not solicit reviews selectively — for example, by inviting only patients they expect to be positive, offering an incentive for a review, or conditioning a refund, discount, or further care on a review being written, changed, or removed. A provider may ask all of their patients, without condition, to leave an honest review.
Reviews we identify as having an undisclosed conflict of interest are removed, and repeated breaches may result in the suspension of an account or the removal of a listing’s claim.
8. One Review Per Experience
Each person may publish one review per provider. A review should describe your overall experience of that provider, not a single appointment among many.
If your view of a provider changes — because care improved, or because it did not — update your existing review rather than adding a second one. Posting repeatedly about the same provider in order to weight their rating is not permitted, and duplicate reviews will be removed.
Where a provider practises at more than one clinic, review the professional and the practice where you were actually seen.
9. Copyright and Licence to Publish
9.1 You Must Own What You Post
You must own, or otherwise have the right to publish, everything in your review. Do not post another person’s words or images — this includes text copied from another review site, forum, or social media post, photographs taken by someone else, and material copied from a provider’s own website or marketing. By submitting a review you confirm that it is your own work and that publishing it does not infringe anyone’s copyright, moral rights, trade marks, or other rights.
9.2 Licence You Grant Us
You keep ownership of your review. By submitting it, you grant Lipedema Clinic Limited a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, and transferable licence to store, reproduce, display, adapt for formatting, translate, excerpt, and syndicate your review in connection with the directory and our promotion of it — including in search results, structured data, aggregate ratings, and excerpts on other pages of our site or on third-party platforms. To the extent your country’s law permits, you waive, and agree not to assert against uses this licence allows, any moral rights in your review, including the right to be identified as its author.
This licence does not take away your control under section 11: if you delete your review, we stop displaying it, and the licence continues only for archival copies, backups, aggregate data your review contributed to, and copies already distributed.
Nobody else gets this licence. No one may copy reviews from this directory and republish them elsewhere without our written permission, and you authorise us to act — in our name or, where necessary, on your behalf — against anyone who takes your review from our platform without permission. Protecting what you wrote from being scraped and reused is part of what you are trusting us with, and we treat it that way.
9.3 Takedown Requests
If you believe a review infringes your copyright or other intellectual property rights, email support@lipedemaclinic.org with the URL of the review, an identification of the work you say has been copied, and your contact details. We will review the request and remove infringing material.
10. How Reviews Are Checked Before Publication
Every submitted review passes through our automated checks before it appears in the directory. Reviews that clear those checks publish immediately. A smaller number are held for a member of our team to read, which usually takes a few hours.
Our checks look for the categories of content listed in section 5. They are a filter against that list, not a test of accuracy: they do not establish whether a review is true, whether an appointment took place, or whether the reviewer’s account of it is fair. Being held for review is not a rejection, and being critical of a provider is never the reason a review is held.
We do not guarantee that every breach of this policy will be detected before publication, or detected at all. Where we become aware of one after publication, we act under section 12 or section 13.
11. Editing and Removing a Review
11.1 By the Reviewer
You may edit or delete your own review at any time. An edited review is re-checked under section 10 before the updated version appears. Deleting a review removes it and its rating from the provider’s aggregate score; it may remain in backups, and in copies already syndicated to third parties, for a period afterwards.
11.2 By Us
We may remove or decline to publish a review that breaches this policy, that we are required by law or by a court order to remove, or that was submitted through an account we have suspended. We do not edit the substance of a review; where a review would otherwise breach this policy only in part, we may remove it and invite the author to resubmit.
We do not remove a review because it is unflattering, because a provider disputes it, or because a provider is a paying customer.
11.3 Deleting Your Account
If you close your Lipedema Clinic account, your published reviews are deleted with it. See our Privacy Policy for how we handle the underlying data.
12. Reporting a Review
Anyone — a reader, a reviewer, or a provider — may report a review they believe breaches this policy, using the report control on the review itself or by emailing support@lipedemaclinic.org.
Reporting a review does not remove it. Reports are queued for a member of our team, who assesses the review against section 5 and section 7 and decides what happens next. We aim to respond to every report.
13. How a Provider Responds to or Disputes a Review
13.1 Responding Publicly
A provider who has claimed their listing may publish a public response to any review of them. Claiming a listing is free at every tier. Publishing a public response is a feature of our paid plans.
Contesting a review is free at every tier, and always will be. Whether you pay us nothing or the most we charge, you can report a review you believe breaches this policy, and it is assessed against the same rules either way. We separate these two things deliberately: answering a criticism in public is a way of using this platform to speak, which is part of what a paid listing buys. Objecting that something published about you is untrue is not a feature, and putting it behind a payment would make the price of being heard depend on the price of a plan.
A response must comply with section 5, and must not disclose a patient’s health information or identify them beyond what they have chosen to disclose themselves. Health privacy obligations continue to apply to a provider in a public response.
13.2 Reporting a Review as Inaccurate
A provider who believes a review is inaccurate, fabricated, or otherwise in breach of this policy may report it. This is free at any tier. Reporting a review from your profile requires a claimed listing, because we have to know that the person objecting speaks for the provider. If yours is not claimed yet, claim it first, or write to us at support@lipedemaclinic.org and we will take the report directly. Tell us the URL of the review, what specifically you say is wrong with it, and any information that supports that.
13.3 What We Do With a Dispute
We assess the review against this policy. We may contact the reviewer and ask them to confirm that they received care from the provider, or to confirm the basis of their review. We may ask for evidence, though we do not require a reviewer to disclose their identity to the provider or to produce medical records. If a reviewer does not respond within a reasonable period, that is one of the factors we take into account.
Where a dispute is on a ground we remove for — for example, that the reviewer was never a patient — we may pass its substance to the review’s author and ask them to respond within a stated period, and if we cannot reach them, or they do not respond within that period, we may remove the review on that basis. A dispute that a review is inaccurate, without more, remains subject to the paragraph below. Separately, where the law of a relevant country prescribes a formal complaint process for content hosts, with set steps and timeframes — as New Zealand’s Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 does — we follow that process within those timeframes, and removal under such a process follows its rules, including where an author cannot be reached or does not respond.
We remove reviews for breaches of this policy. We do not remove a review for being unflattering. A disagreement about what happened at an appointment, without more, is not a basis for removal — we are not in a position to decide which account is correct (section 2), and a policy that removed criticism whenever it was denied would make the directory worthless to the people it is for.
Where we decline to remove a review, we will say so. A provider is then free to publish a response under 13.1, and to pursue whatever remedy they consider they have against the review’s author (section 6). Nothing in this policy limits a provider’s legal rights, or requires them to use this process before exercising them.
14. Privacy and How Reviews Are Displayed
Published reviews show a shortened display name — a first name and last initial, for example “Sarah M.” We do not display your full name or your email address. Dates of experience are shown as month and year only, for example “Visited March 2026”, so a review cannot be matched to a specific appointment.
A shortened display name reduces how easily a review is linked to you by a casual reader. It is not anonymity. A provider may still be able to identify you from the details of what you describe, and, as set out in section 6, it does not make a review anonymous in law. If being identified would put you at risk, consider carefully what identifying detail you include.
Reviews are public. They can be read without an account, indexed by search engines, and copied by others once published. Our Privacy Policy explains what personal information we hold about reviewers and how to exercise your rights under the Privacy Act 2020.
15. What Paid Plans Do Not Buy
A provider may claim their listing, and paid plans allow them to add more to it — a photo, a video, a website or booking link, their services and availability. That is what a paid plan buys: how a profile is presented, never what it says about them.
No plan, at any price, allows a provider to remove, hide, edit, reorder, or soften a review, or to change a star rating or review count. Ratings and reviews are not for sale, and payment plays no part in how a report or dispute is decided.
The “Verified by LC” badge marks engagement with Lipedema Clinic education. It cannot be bought, and it has no bearing on a provider’s reviews or rating.
16. Referral Links and Sponsored Placement
Some booking links on listing pages may be referral links, meaning we may receive a commission if you book through them. Where that is the case it is disclosed on the page. It does not affect which providers are listed, their rating, or what reviews say about them.
We may in future offer sponsored placement as a paid product. It does not exist today, and nothing currently shown in the directory has been paid for. If we introduce it, it will be labelled Sponsored, it will appear as a clearly marked placement rather than as a community-ranked result, it will not reorder organic results, and it will not change a provider’s reviews, rating, review count, or badge.
17. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The updated version will be posted on this page with a revised “Last updated” date, and continued use of the directory after that constitutes acceptance of the revised policy. For material changes we will make reasonable efforts to notify members, for example by email or an in-platform notification.
18. Contact Us
Questions about this policy, reports about a review, and takedown requests all go to the same place:
Lipedema Clinic Limited
Care of Lipedema Clinic, 3 Picton Avenue
Addington, Christchurch 8011
New Zealand
Email: support@lipedemaclinic.org