Independently ranked — no pay-to-rank · Built on the federal NPI registry · Who’s behind this

How we rank clinics

We rank clinics on objective, checkable signals — never on payment. Here is exactly what goes into the order you see.

What each signal means

Interventional pain capability. Whether the practice carries the interventional pain medicine credential (NUCC taxonomy 208VP0014X), indicating image-guided procedural capability beyond medication management.

Verified patient rating & review volume. Aggregate rating and the number of verified reviews from public sources. Volume is scaled so a long track record counts without letting a single five-star review dominate.

Years in practice. Time since the practice's national provider record was established, capped so very established and moderately established practices aren't separated unfairly.

Contact transparency. Whether the clinic publishes a working website and phone number — a basic marker of accessibility.

Who is ranked

A practice appears in the directory because the federal NPI registry shows a pain taxonomy among the codes it has declared. Some of those records are not places that treat pain — medical-supply and equipment companies, dispensing sites, laboratories, technologists. They stay listed, because the record is real and the address may be exactly what someone is looking for, but they take no rank among clinics that treat patients. You will find them below the ranked list on an area page, and filtering that page to their discipline ranks them against each other, which is the only comparison that means anything for them.

That exclusion reads a practice's primary registration — the single code it registered itself under. A pain clinic that also dispenses braces is still a pain clinic and still ranks; only a record whose own registration says “supplier” is held out.

Every card names the practice type whenever pain medicine is not the practice's primary registration, so a chiropractor or a supplier says so before you call.

Filtering by discipline

An area page can be narrowed to a discipline — chiropractic, physical therapy, podiatry, neurology, medical supply, and so on. Those chips read every taxonomy code a practice has declared, not just its primary one, because half the directory declares more than one: a practice registered as both an interventional pain provider and a chiropractor is findable under both, which is what someone searching for a chiropractor actually needs.

Only disciplines with at least one practice on that page are offered, and each chip carries its count, so you can see whether it will narrow anything before you spend a tap on it.

Insurance

An area page can also be narrowed to clinics that accept Medicare, and that switch works alongside the discipline chips rather than replacing them — so “chiropractic, accepts Medicare” is a question you can ask.

The signal comes from the federal CMS Medicare Fee-For-Service provider enrollment file, or from the clinic itself where it has claimed its listing and told us directly; the clinic's own answer always wins, because it knows its billing better than a registry lookup does.

A clinic missing from that federal file is never shown as refusing Medicare. A practice can bill under a group identifier, or have enrolled since the file was last refreshed, and we cannot tell those apart from genuine non-enrollment — so we mark only what we can confirm, and the filter offers no opposite. Whatever it says, check your specific plan with the clinic before you book.

We do not publish commercial-plan networks. No free public source lists which practices are in-network for a given insurer, network status changes contract by contract, and a wrong answer there costs a patient real money — so until clinics tell us themselves, we would rather offer nothing than a guess.

What we're still adding

As data coverage expands, we will fold in the range of procedures offered and the conditions each practice treats. Insurance and discipline are filters, not ranking signals — accepting Medicare has never moved a clinic up. We publish changes to this methodology rather than adjusting rankings silently.

Independence

We do not accept payment in exchange for a higher ranking. Sponsored placements, if any, are clearly labeled and never alter the objective order above. The same goes for brand advertisements from businesses that are not clinics (a law firm, say): they are marked “Advertisement”, sit outside every ranked list, and have no say in what we write. Today, the organization behind this directory owns no clinics, so these rankings carry no ownership conflict. See our ownership disclosure.