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How we work
Independence you can check, not just claims you have to trust.
Last reviewed: July 2026
No one pays to appear
No hospital, clinic, surgeon or device maker can buy a position, a ranking or a mention on RedMontActive. We take no advertising and no sponsorship. Our only revenue is the one-time access fee people pay to run searches — which means our incentives point at being useful to patients, not to providers.
How specialists are found and ordered
When you search, we research currently practising specialists relevant to your specific condition and location, drawing on live public sources. We never use the words "top" or "best" — only "most relevant" — and no one can buy a position.
Specialists are ranked on merit, using the same criteria as our sister platform RedMontMed. Surgeons are ordered by surgical case volume and complexity at high-volume centres, then peer-reviewed publications on surgical management, then development of advanced or minimally invasive technique, then national or European surgical society leadership. Physicians are ordered by registered status, then clinical-trial involvement, then academic impact, then publications, then years of experience.
We label every specialist by how you access them in their country's system: NHS, private, insurance-covered, or a combination. Where a clinician works in both public and private settings, we say so — the private route is often a shorter wait to the same person.
Clinical trials
We look for active or recently recruiting trials across more than one register — ClinicalTrials.gov together with the EU Clinical Trials Information System (CTIS) and the EU Clinical Trials Register, plus ISRCTN and the WHO's international registry where relevant. If there are fewer than three trials open in your own country, we include European trials that are open to patients from your country, and tell you which register each came from.
Recovery ranges, not single numbers
Recovery timelines on RedMontActive are always shown as the honest range most people experience, with the factors that shift you earlier or later within it. We do this because a single date is almost always wrong for the individual reading it, and because a best case presented as typical sets people up to feel they are failing when they are in fact recovering normally.
What we are not
We are an information service, not a medical provider, and not a booking agent. We do not diagnose, we do not treat, and we do not take a commission on any onward referral. Decisions about your care belong with you and your clinicians.