Editorial standards

The commitments behind every guide

These are the rules the guides are written against. They exist because the alternative — an affiliate site that quietly optimises for whatever pays best — is exactly what people expect when they land here.

• Useful before enthusiastic. A guide has to help someone decide. If a product only suits a narrow situation, the guide says so instead of finding something nice to say about it.
• Compensation does not buy placement. No affiliate program or affiliate tracking is connected to this site today. If one is ever added, which products appear and in what order is still decided before any merchant program is considered, and every page carrying a compensated link says so.
• No clinical claims. Guides describe what a product is and how it is built. They do not describe what it will do for your body, and they do not present shopping research as care.
• Eligibility is quoted, never asserted. A merchant’s FSA or HSA label is evidence of how that merchant classifies an item. Federal qualified medical expense rules, your plan’s terms, the nature of the expense and required substantiation control reimbursement, and documentation is product-, plan- and circumstance-specific.
• Prices and availability are dated. A price or stock statement records the day its source was read and names the page it was read from. A figure without a date is treated as unverified.
• Nothing is hands-on tested. No product on this site has been worn, operated, assembled or durability-tested, and no sentence may imply that one has.
• Corrections stay visible. When a guide is updated, the date changes and the reason is recorded in the guide. Specifications and availability move quickly in this category.

How a guide is researched

1. Identify the exact product — its manufacturer identifier and its merchant SKU — so a comparison is about one thing rather than a category.
2. Read the current merchant listing for price, availability, eligibility evidence and stated return terms, and record the date each was read.
3. Read the manufacturer’s specifications and product manual where they are published, and record it as a gap where they are not.
4. Write the comparison within a category, so like is judged against like, and name at least one meaningful limitation for every product.
5. Re-check the eligibility wording against current merchant documentation and the federal rules before publishing, and hold back any product whose evidence has not closed.

A product that fails any of those steps is held out of the comparison and named with the evidence that is still missing, rather than included with a general caveat.

Language rules

Recovery is a category where careless wording does real harm, so some phrasings are simply not available to us:

• No outcome or treatment language. Products are described by what they are and how they are built, never by what they will do for a body.
• No clinical endorsement, implied or stated, and no imagery suggesting a clinical setting.
• No hands-on implication. Nothing has been worn, operated, assembled or durability-tested, and no sentence may imply that it has.
• No manufacturer or merchant claim repeated as an independent finding. Where a listing states a duration, a benefit or a performance figure, it is attributed to whoever published it.
• No guaranteed eligibility. A merchant’s FSA or HSA label is described as evidence of that merchant’s classification, never as a reimbursement decision.
• No manufactured urgency. Deadlines are real facts about benefits accounts; countdown pressure is a sales tactic.

Updates and corrections

Every guide carries the date it was last reviewed and a short note on what changed. Specifications, availability and eligibility wording move quickly in this category, so a guide with an old date is treated as unverified rather than evergreen.

Errors are corrected in place, with the correction noted rather than quietly absorbed.

Errors are corrected in place and material corrections are noted. For corrections, privacy requests or questions about a disclosure, email hello@painrecoverypro.com.